The student Justine joins a group of idealistic university students who fight to protect forests from attempts at deforestation and construction. When the group learns that in Peru a well-known multinational is about to clear areas inhabited by an ancient tribe that has never come into contact with civilization, they decide to go there to stage a flash mob right at the designated location. The plan is to arrive by plane in the jungle thanks to the help of a contact on site, secretly chain themselves to the trees, and stage a protest armed with cameras and cell phones to record any violent reactions by the workers and local authorities. The plan works perfectly, and the young people set off again to return to the local airport where the commercial plane that would take them home is waiting. But during the journey through the jungle, the small tourist plane has a breakdown and crashes. Only a few survive the impact, including Justine, but the survivors are immediately intercepted by a local tribe, the same one they have saved... but the young people are unaware that this tribe practices cannibalism and now they have arrived just in time for lunch!
Quentin Tarantino's protégé, Eli Roth, has returned to directing after a six-year hiatus, and of course he does so with the genre he likes the most and that made him famous to the general public: horror. We know how much the director of "Cabin Fever" and "Hostel" is a fan of Italian genre cinema and has already demonstrated this with the successful "Hostel: Part II" in which, in addition to the affectionate presence of well-known figures of our bis cinema like Luc Merenda, Edwige Fenech, and Ruggero Deodato, there were numerous references to Italian horror from the glorious 1970s decade.
Today with "The Green Inferno" Roth celebrates that cinema in an even more explicit way, reproducing one of the most controversial and ferocious subgenres of Italian horror, namely the cannibal movie, which had great international success at the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s thanks to "Cannibal Holocaust" by Ruggero Deodato. Unlike Tarantino, however, who in recent times has attempted only nominal remakes of some Italian cult films ("Quel maledetto treno blindato" and "Django"), Eli Roth does not make direct references to any particular cannibal movie, although the final result resembles the famous film by Deodato in a much more marked way, with scattered citations of other classics such as "Ultimo mondo cannibale" also by Deodato and "La montagna del Dio cannibale" by Sergio Martino.
"The Green Inferno," however, is a 100% Eli Roth film, bearing his mark and style, which essentially translates into the combination of splatter & irony. With an irreverent jab at environmentalist groups, who in this specific case are a bunch of shabby and irresponsible rich kids who "commit" more for trend or boredom than real interest in the cause, Roth immediately takes an original and personal turn that on the one hand explicitly highlights the Americanness of the work and on the other hand immediately fits into the narrative tradition dear to the director of "Hostel."
The protagonists of "The Green Inferno," in fact, are not much different from those who already populated Roth's previous films, a more or less large group of similar personalities, mostly young, irresponsible, if not downright mean, who "deserve" to meet a very bad end, among whom, however, stands out a character who is internally better than the others, who this time has the features of Lorenza Izzo. Whether it is a pure person, with their head on their shoulders, intelligent, and willing to sacrifice themselves, even the positive element of the group tends to let themselves be carried away by events and the crowd, ending up in a very bad situation that will drastically change their life. Types almost from a slasher movie, which in the conception of "The Green Inferno" create a strange combination with the themes of cannibalistic cinema.
The result is a strongly American film, for better or worse, with Roth-like characters who do not manage to be loved or leave a particular mark, inserted in a context that seeks extreme gore effect and loud laughter. Specifically, the scenes of great violence that refer to the tradition of the cannibal movie are not many, but they still leave a mark, with a killing in particular that reaches really high peaks of sadism. Strangely, however, there is no concession to the erotic/morbid sphere, often present in the prototypes and proposed by Roth already in the two "Hostel." Then, unfortunately, there is this desire to wink at the teen spectator with more demented tastes and we are not spared a disgustingly noisy scene that implies urgent bodily discharges and a "genius" idea based on marijuana that is frankly of a stupidity and unreality really excessive.
Overlooking these concessions of demencial authorship, "The Green Inferno" nevertheless presents itself as a largely enjoyable product, amused and amusing, in line with Eli Roth's cinema.
In short, with the almost adolescent desire to pay homage to extreme Italian cinema, Roth ultimately reflects "Hostel," that is, his version in Amazonian sauce, with unpleasant youngsters, travel to foreign lands as a device for isolation, and death scenes that involve torture and suffering. If you play along, you have fun, but don't call it the heir of "Cannibal Holocaust."
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