The Green Inferno |
A group of student activists travels to the Amazon to save the rain forest and soon discover that they are not alone, and that no good deed goes unpunished.
Director:
Eli RothWriters:
Guillermo Amoedo, Eli RothStars:
Lorenza Izzo, Ariel Levy, Aaron Burns |Storyline
In New York, the college student Justine joins a group of activists led by Alejandro and he invites her to travel to Peru to protest against a timber industry that is destroying the Amazon rain forest. The group uses their cellphones to film the destruction and send the footages through Internet. Alejandro uses Justine that is almost killed by one security guard to succeed in his intent of calling attention of audiences. When the group is returning to civilization, the plane blows-up and crashes into the forest. Soon the survivors discover that they are not alone and they are abduct by a tribe of Indians. But their nightmare becomes worse when they realize that the Indians are cannibals.Written by Claudio Carvalho, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Personal feelings about graphically violent movies like the "Saw" franchise or Roth's own "Hostel" films aside, Roth's film "The Green Inferno" has a colorful history. The film traces its roots to cannibal-themed movies made in Italy during the 1970s and 80s. Roth's 2015 resurrection of this controversial horror sub-genre draws most directly from 1980's "Cannibal Holocaust", a movie so realistic that director Ruggero Deodato was arrested and put on trial for the murder of some of the actors in the film. (Deodato was only exonerated after he gathered all of his actors together for a TV show appearance and then demonstrated in court the special effects used to create the actors' "deaths".) That movie's working title was "The Green Inferno", a title which was eventually applied to the most gruesome scenes in "Cannibal Holocaust", specifically, the film within the film that purports to show footage from a missing documentary film crew. (This was the first use of the "found footage" or "pseudo-documentary" device, which was popularized in the U.S. by 1999's "The Blair Witch Project".) The title "The Green Inferno" was later also used as an alternate title for the 1988 sequel "Cannibal Holocaust II". Eli Roth filmed "The Green Inferno" in the jungles of Peru in 2012. His film opened at the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival. It was scheduled to be released in the U.S. in September 2014, but financial problems at the film's production company led to the film being pulled. Blumhouse Productions stepped in and the company's multi-platform releasing arm, BH Tilt, released "The Green Inferno" on September 25, 2015.
After a brief scene of bulldozers flattening a rain forest in the Amazon, the narrative of Roth's cannibal film starts innocuously on the streets of New York City. College freshman Justine (Lorenza Izzo) and her roommate, Kaycee (singer-songwriter Sky Ferreira), are annoyed by the student activists protesting outside their window, but Justine is also intrigued. She attends one of the group's meetings in which their charismatic student leader, Alejandro (Ariel Levy), discusses their plan to save a village in Peru from being overrun by bulldozers paving the way for a natural gas mining operation. The students plan to dress as workers, chain themselves to trees and bulldozers, then live stream video from their cell phones to get the world's attention – and keep themselves from being shot by the armed mercenaries which protect the operation. Justine's dad (Richard Burgi), a lawyer at the U.N., expresses his reservations, but Justine goes on what she naively believes will be a weekend trip to save a native tribe from extinction.