Review of The Green Inferno (2013) by Jeff B — 27 Sep 2015

Fun for whole family - but only if it's the Manson Family - Eli Roth's gross but oftentimes scary exercise in cannibal horror runs the movie gamut from B to Z. You have to hand it to Roth, the brain dead, er, brain child behind gray area, er, gray matter splattering flicks like Cabin Fever, Hostel, and Hostel Part II. At least he's consistent. He ratchets up the nausea factor from 0 to Hero like none other. Vomit, blood, semen, entrails, and excrement fly around the screen so fast and often that it makes medical school autopsy videos look like High School Musical. Oh, he presents much of the carnage with a smile but that doesn't make his style of bloodletting any less sophomoric.

In this R-rated horror flick, group of student activists (Izzo, Ariel Levy, Aaron Burns, et al) travels to the Amazon to save the rain forest and soon discover that they are not alone, and that no good deed goes unpunished.

Not only do the Eco-unfriendlies on screen lose their brains, but audiences do a bit by proxy. The cast bleed, scream, and remember their lines on cue but this all matters little under such devoted direction. Still, so far as gross-out horror goes, Roth excels at this sub-genre and earns a dubious crown for somehow keeping the nearly X-rated bedlam below an NC-17 rating for MPAA, ahem, standards.

Bottom line: Hostel Enviornment.