FINALLY!!!
It has been 2 years that i have been waiting to see this fucken movie. It was first shown at a film festival in 2013 and then got pulled from its 2014 release date due to financial issues and now it has finally arrived. Was it worth the wait? Yeh, it wasn’t amazing but no-one was expecting that.

The Green Inferno is a film from the twisted mind of Eli Roth where a group of activists travel deep into Amazon in order to save the forest but come across an untouched tribe of cannibals, and all hell ensues. As expected from an Eli Roth film, this does feature his trademark excessive gore and would most definitely fall into the ‘Torture Porn’ horror sub-genre. Roth has been quoted saying that he took inspiration from 1980’s ‘Cannibal Holocaust’, a film that caused a whole lot of controversy when it was released. So from that you know that the focus of this film is going to be lots and lots of gore and you definitely get that. Despite my anticipation to see this film, i still went into it not expecting much in terms of getting an amazing film but it did tick all of the main boxes that i expected it to.

Lets start with the focus of the film, the gore. I personally like the idea showing a tonne of gore as long as there is a reason for it to be there. For example, the ‘Saw’ franchise is built around the gore so it makes sense that it would be gruesome and that is the same for this film. The gore in this film is definitely not for the faint of heart, it even made me cringe at some moments. Roth did a great job at creating these very confronting shots that show off the gore and blood and violence so effectively. The very graphic violence is what makes this film stand out above anything else, you take out that gore and you just have a generic horror flick that probably would never have been made. There isn’t really much i can say about the gore other than it is bloody and it is disgusting, but overall it was exactly what i wanted to see. People getting excessively mutilated was what i wanted going in and it is exactly what i got.

In terms of the characters, i thought there were like 2 maybe 3 interesting characters and everyone else was either just a throwaway character or seemed a little too generic and cliche. This made it difficult to really care about some of the characters but at least the main protagonist i thought was well set up and well developed and did a good job at leading the film. Much of that was due to her performance, it wasn’t amazing but Lorenza Izzo did well at leading this cast of mostly unknowns. (Yes, i know, that completely contradicts what i said in my ‘Knock Knock’ review where i said i didn’t want to see her act anymore. Maybe she just made a bad decision, a really, really bad decision). Daryl Sabara and Aaron Burns held the film together and kept it interesting when nothing much was going on.

The plot of the film was also really weak i thought, but i’m not going to hold it against the film much. Eli Roth only really needed to find an excuse to get them into the forest and from there he let the gore take over. I still think the first act went for way too long, the first 30 minutes was progressing really slowly and was setting up some characters that were pretty much irrelevant for the rest of the film. The plot wasn’t fascinating but it was ok, and let the film progress at a reasonable pace after the 30 minute mark.

So in the end, The Green Inferno was an accumulation of blood, gore and excessive violence from the sick mind of Eli Roth and through his use of sharp and confronting camera movements he managed to make it entertaining. If you don’t like gore you won’t like this film (pretty self-explanatory), as it is the main driver of the film and the best parts of the film. Some well done characters were a highlight but the throwaway supporting cast and lack of interesting plot really do hold the film down despite not being a focus.

5.5/10