The Green Inferno (film)

The Green Inferno
Theatrical release poster
Directed by	Eli Roth
Produced by	Eli Roth Miguel Asensio Nicolás López Christopher Woodrow Molly Conners Jason Blum
Screenplay by	Guillermo Amoedo Eli Roth
Story by	Eli Roth
Starring	Lorenza Izzo Ariel Levy Daryl Sabara Kirby Bliss Blanton Sky Ferreira Magda Apanowicz Nicolás Martinez Aaron Burns Ignacia Allamand Ramón Llao Richard Burgi
Music by	Manuel Riveiro
Cinematography	Antonio Quercia
Edited by	Ernesto Díaz Espinoza
Production companies	Worldview Entertainment Dragonfly Entertainment Sobras International Pictures Open Road Films
Distributed by	Blumhouse Tilt High Top Releasing Universal Pictures
Release dates	September 8, 2013 (2013-09-08) (TIFF) September 25, 2015 (2015-09-25) (United States)
Running time	100 minutes[1]
Country	United States
Language	English
Budget	$5 million[2]
Box office	$12.7 million[2]

The Green Inferno is a 2013 American cannibal horror film directed by Eli Roth. The film was inspired by and is a homage to Italian cannibal films of the late 1970s and early '80s "cannibal boom", including Cannibal Holocaust (1980), which features a film-within-a-film titled The Green Inferno. The film follows a group of activists who are forced to fight for survival when they are captured by a cannibalistic tribe.

Plot

Justine, a college freshman at Columbia University, becomes interested in a social activism group on her campus, led by Alejandro and his girlfriend, Kara. The group plans a trip to the Amazon rainforest to stop a company from logging and obliterating ancient native tribes there; the goal is to film the logging crews with cell phones and stream footage to raise awareness. Justine, whose father is an attorney for the United Nations, suggests she could bring attention to the issue through her father. Her roommate, Kaycee, thinks that the mission is stupid and therefore stays behind.

The operation is funded by a drug dealer named Carlos, who takes the group of students to Peru via plane. They arrive in the Amazon and head to a logging site where they begin their protest, chaining themselves to bulldozers while filming the loggers cutting down trees. The logger's private militia then arrives on the scene, but cannot seem to break open the chains to get them away from the logging site. The protest receives viral attention on the internet when Justine is almost shot dead by one of the militia officers. The group is then arrested, but Carlos pays the police to let them go. Justine then realizes that she was a pawn: if things went badly, nobody would kill the daughter of a UN attorney. As the plane leaves, it crashes into the forest, resulting in the death of Carlos.

Protest members Justine, Alejandro, Kara, Jonah, Lars, Amy, Samantha, and Daniel survive and search for a GPS phone, to call for help with. All of a sudden, young men painted in red come out of the bushes, and Kara is killed with arrows to the neck and head. The rest of the group are knocked unconscious with tranquilizer darts. They awaken on boats led by a native tribe, and are taken to a small village, where they are imprisoned in a bamboo cage. The female elder of the tribe ritually dismembers, beheads, and eats Jonah, while the others watch in shock. The group then realizes that the tribe was the very one that they had wanted to protect, and that they are cannibals. Alejandro later tells the group that the mission to save the tribe was a fake, and that he had been paid by Carlos to do it, who owned a rival logging company. Soon after, Samantha attempts to escape, but she is darted and the group then finds out that they're being watched by a watchman.

The next morning, the tribe's general, a bald headhunter, orders Justine, Samantha, and Amy out of the cage. The three girls are then tested with a sharpened instrument, and Justine is revealed to be a virgin. She is then taken away, and prepared for a genital mutilation ceremony.

When Samantha and Amy are brought back to the cage, they distract the watchman with a ringing cell phone and Samantha escapes to a canoe to hide in. The next day, Justine is returned with paint marks on her, and the tribe brings the prisoners bowls of pork scraps to eat. After finishing hers, Amy finds a piece of skin at the bottom of her bowl, bearing one of Samantha's tattoos. She then realizes that Samantha was recaptured and killed, and that she just ate her girlfriend. She then smashes her bowl and uses a shard to cut her throat and commit suicide. Lars then puts a sack of marijuana that Carlos gave him down Amy's throat, hoping that will make the tribe sick if they eat her. Eventually, Justine and Daniel escape, leaving Alejandro (for lying) and Lars (who Alejandro knocks out, out of anger) behind. Lars later wakes up, but the tribe then eats him alive.

Justine and Daniel return to the site of the plane crash, where the victims of the crash are facing up on poles. Justine then finds a phone in the deceased Kara's pocket, but the tribe recaptures them shortly after. Justine is prepared for her ceremony while Daniel is tied to a pole, has his legs broken, covered in a green powder and is fed to ants. Logging machinery attracts the tribe to the jungle; the distraction allows Justine to escape with the help of a child sympathizer. Justine sees a dying Daniel and he begs her to kill him. Being grief-stricken and shocked at his request, she refuses as she searches him for the phone while he still begs. The child sympathizer blows a white powder into Daniel's face, knocking him out before slitting his throat mercifully. Alejandro is abandoned by Justine in the cage, even though he begged her to let him out. Two other tribe members chase her down with the intent to kidnap her, but lose her when she crosses a river with a black jaguar on the other side of it. However, the big cat doesn't harm her, and she runs into the jungle. Justine then encounters the loggers, who are slaughtering the natives by using their sub-machine guns, and the headhunter is shot dead. Justine then uses Kara's phone to pretend to film the fight, so the militia would stop firing on the natives. Justine is then taken home to safety, by one of the loggers' helicopters.

In New York, a disenchanted Justine lies to her father and the UN, telling them she was the only survivor of the crash and that the tribe was friendly to her. That night, Justine has a nightmare that Alejandro comes back from the jungle. The next morning, she sees that Alejandro's face on shirts is being used to promote further activism on campus by those unaware of his manipulations.

In a mid-credits scene, a satellite map of the forest appears while a phone conversation between Justine and Alejandro's sister, Lucia, takes place. Lucia says that she has found him on a satellite GPS image which zooms in to the surviving Alejandro, painted black and standing in the middle of the jungle.

Cast

• Lorenza Izzo as Justine^[3]
• Ariel Levy as Alejandro^[3]
• Daryl Sabara as Lars
• Kirby Bliss Blanton as Amy^[3]
• Sky Ferreira as Kaycee^[3]
• Magda Apanowicz as Samantha^[3]
• Nicolás Martínez as Daniel
• Aaron Burns as Jonah^[3]
• Ignacia Allamand as Kara
• Ramón Llao as The Bald Headhunter
• Richard Burgi as Charles
• Matías López as Carlos Lincones
• Antonieta Pari as The Elder

Production

On May 17, 2012, at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival, Eli Roth announced that he was planning to direct a horror thriller, The Green Inferno, with Worldview Entertainment stating that it would finance and produce the film.^[4] Roth wrote the script with Guillermo Amoedo.^[5] Production began in Autumn 2012 in Peru and Chile.^[6] In October 2012, it was announced that filming was set to begin in November in Peru.^[7] On October 25, Roth announced the full cast for the film.^[8] Principal photography began in October 2012 in New York City, and shooting in Peru and in some locations in Chile began on November 5, 2012.^[7]

Roth said in an interview in February 2013 that he wanted the film to look like a Werner Herzog or Terrence Malick film. He has also said that he was inspired by such Italian cannibal films as Cannibal Holocaust and Cannibal Ferox.^[9]

Release

On July 30, 2013, it was announced that The Green Inferno would premiere at the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival.^[10] The film was intended to be released theatrically on September 5, 2014 by Open Road Films.^[11] However, financial difficulties with the production company Worldview Entertainment caused Open Road to pull it from its original release.^[12][13] The film had a secret screening on 25 April 2014 at the Stanley Film Festival.^[14]

The Green Inferno was eventually theatrically released in the United States on September 25, 2015 by Blumhouse Productions' multi-platform arm Blumhouse Tilt, Universal Pictures, and High Top Releasing.^[15] It was released in Filipino theaters on September 23, 2015 by Solar Pictures. Two versions of the film were presented there, depending on the cinema chain: an R-13 "sanitized" version with some gory details removed, resulting in five minutes of footage edited out, and the uncut R-18 version.

Box office

The film opened to 1,540 venues, earning $3,520,626 in its opening weekend, ranking ninth place in the domestic box office.^[16] At the end of its run, six weeks later on November 5, the film grossed $7,192,291 in the United States and Canada, and $5,474,041 overseas for a worldwide total of $12,666,332.^[2]

Critical reception

The Green Inferno received generally negative reviews from critics; however, some praised the film's throwback vibe to earlier Italian cannibal horror films of the 1970s and its social commentary. On Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds a rating of 34%, based on 83 reviews, with an average rating of 4.5/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "The Green Inferno may not win writer-director Eli Roth many new converts, but fans of his flair for gory spectacle should find it a suitably gruesome diversion."^[17] On Metacritic, the film has a score of 38 out of 100, based on 19 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable reviews".^[18] CinemaScore audiences gave the film an average grade of "C-" on an A+ to F scale.^[19]

The film received a glowing response from horror novelist Stephen King, who tweeted that the film is "like a glorious throwback to the drive-in movies of my youth: bloody, gripping, hard to watch, but you can't look away."^[20][21] Todd Gilchrist of The Wrap gave the film a negative review, stating "Unfortunately, Roth’s abundant gore fails to either offend or exhilarate."^[22] Birth. Movies. Death.'s Meredith Borders, reporting from Fantasia Fest, gave the film a more positive notice: "The Green Inferno never lets up: it barrels ahead, exuberant and relentless in its brutality, never giving the audience a second to unclench. It's a feast for gorehounds, one with an unsubtle message about the way that uninformed activism harms more than it helps. And it's a total blast."^[23]

Controversy

The film was criticized by Survival International, which campaigns for indigenous peoples and indigenous peoples living in voluntary isolation, as reinforcing colonialism and respectively neocolonialism, as well as their stigmas against indigenous peoples, portraying them as savage.^[24] Roth dismissed this argument as unimportant for stopping exploitation: "The idea that a fictional movie about a fictional tribe could somehow hurt indigenous people when gas companies are tearing these villages apart on a daily basis is simply absurd. These companies don't need an excuse—they have one—the natural resources in the ground. They can window dress things however they like, but nobody will destroy a village because they didn't like a character in a movie, they'll do it because they want to get rich by draining what's under the village. The fear that somehow a movie would give them ammunition to destroy a tribe all sounds like misdirected anger and frustration that the corporations are the ones controlling the fates of these uncontacted tribes."^[24]

Home media

The Green Inferno was released on DVD and Blu-ray on January 5, 2016 by Universal Home Entertainment. The release features a director's cut and an audio commentary by Roth, López, Izzo, Burns, Blanton and Sabara.^[25]

Sequel

On September 7, 2013, it was announced that a sequel would be produced, titled Beyond the Green Inferno and directed by Nicolás López.^[26] As of May 2016 there have been no further updates, other than articles referencing the original 2013 announcement and a single unsubstantiated comment, with no production details, that a sequel is still under consideration.^[27]

References

External links

• The Green Inferno at the Internet Movie Database
• The Green Inferno at Box Office Mojo
• The Green Inferno at Rotten Tomatoes
• The Green Inferno at Metacritic