The Green Inferno

In writer/​critic Kim Newman’s sem­i­nal hor­ror cin­e­ma sur­vey, ​‘Night­mare Movies’, there’s a chap­ter enti­tled ​‘Can­ni­bal Zom­bie Gut-Crunch­ers – Ital­ian Style!’ which exam­ines the icky sub-stra­tum of movies in which peo­ple eat oth­er people.

You can imag­ine a young Eli Roth, in his Mario Bava jim­my-jams, being enchant­ed by this tome, espe­cial­ly by this chap­ter. But where he might have drunk in the glossy stills of dis­em­bow­elled star­lets impaled on giant spikes, and made copi­ous notes of the obscure titles men­tioned, maybe he didn’t get as far as actu­al­ly read­ing what these films are about, their func­tion and – in a few cas­es – what makes them great.

The Green Infer­no limps on to UK screens after thee years in cold stor­age, and it’s Roth’s bun­gled homage to these gris­ly spec­ta­cles of yore. But where those films wield­ed a man­date to offend and repulse like a blood-splashed badge of hon­our, this still feels too nice – it’s like a veg­an can­ni­bal movie. Yes, Roth’s film has its expect­ed moments of high trans­gres­sion, but you can nev­er get away from the fact that all these ref­er­ences have been attached to the most hack­neyed teen slash­er nar­ra­tive imaginable.

Angu­lar stu­dents are hacked off that the world is, like, so unfair, and so embroil them­selves in a clear­ly ille­git­i­mate scheme to save indige­nous rain­for­est tribes from the jaws of the cor­po­rate bull­doz­er. But – oop­sy! – turns out the tribes being saved want to offer thanks to their west­ern savours by claw­ing out their eyes, butcher­ing their extrem­i­ties and then plac­ing their still-warm tor­sos into an oven at a low broil for about three-to-four hours. Then they want to use the trib­al-tat­tooed tiles of burnt skin as a frisbee.

Where a film like Rug­gero Deodato’s Can­ni­bal Holo­caust from 1980 pre­sent­ed his tribe of ​“sav­ages” as essen­tial­ly peace­able, only resort­ing to flesh-eat­ing as a social defence mech­a­nism, the body-paint­ed tribe at the cen­tre of The Green Infer­no exist sole­ly to munch on brains. Their mono-mania is com­plete­ly dull. So instead of get­ting a film with any desire to talk about real peo­ple and actu­al sit­u­a­tions, we have a deeply hate xeno­pho­bic fan­ta­sy where – despite their pam­pered igno­rance – lib­er­al bour­geois west­ern­ers are still the heroes.

It’s a ran­cid work, on many lev­els. But it’s great that Roth has focused so much atten­tion on mak­ing sure he cap­tures exact­ly what it would be like to vom­it in a plane as it’s about the crash to earth.