The Green Inferno (film)

The Green Inferno
Theatrical release poster
Directed by	Eli Roth
Screenplay by	Guillermo Amoedo Eli Roth
Story by	Eli Roth
Produced by	Miguel Asensio Molly Conners Nicolás López Eli Roth Christopher Woodrow
Starring	Lorenza Izzo Ariel Levy Daryl Sabara Kirby Bliss Blanton Sky Ferreira Magda Apanowicz Nicolás Martinez Aaron Burns Ignacia Allamand Ramón Llao Richard Burgi
Cinematography	Antonio Quercia
Edited by	Ernesto Díaz Espinoza
Music by	Manuel Riveiro
Distributed by	Blumhouse Tilt Universal Pictures
Release dates	September 8, 2013 (2013-09-08) (TIFF) September 25, 2015 (2015-09-25) (United States)
Running time	100 minutes
Country	United States
Language	English
Budget	$5 million
Box office	$8.8 million

The Green Inferno is a 2013 American horror film directed by Eli Roth and co-written by Roth and Guillermo Amoedo. Starring Lorenza Izzo, Ariel Levy, Daryl Sabara, Kirby Bliss Blanton, and Aaron Burns in the lead roles, the film was inspired by Italian cannibal films of the late 1970s and early '80s, including Cannibal Holocaust (1980), which features a film-within-a-film titled The Green Inferno.

Plot

Justine (Lorenza Izzo), a college freshman in New York City, becomes interested in a social activism group on her campus, led by an older student named Alejandro (Ariel Levy) and his girlfriend, Kara. Jonah, a member of the group, invites Justine to join, but her roommate Kaycee (Sky Ferreira) is wary and cynical of the idea. The group plans a trip to the Amazon rainforest to stop a company from logging thousands of acres and obliterating ancient native tribes there; the goal is to film the logging crews with cell phones and stream live footage to raise awareness. Justine, whose father is an attorney for the United Nations, suggests she could bring further attention to the issue through her father's connections.

The operation is funded by a man named Carlos, who takes the group of students to Peru via plane. They arrive in the Amazon and begin the protest, dressing in the loggers' gear and chaining themselves to the trees. The protest receives viral attention on the internet, when Justine is almost shot dead by one of the militia, due to a faulty lock that was given to her by Kara. Justine realizes she was being used as protection if things were to go bad, because they wouldn't kill a daughter of a UN attorney. On the plane ride out of the Amazon, an engine explodes, causing the plane to crash into the forest, resulting in the death of Carlos and other passengers.

Justine, Alejandro, Kara, Jonah, Lars, Amy, Samantha, and Daniel all survive the wreckage. As they search for the GPS phone, Kara is suddenly killed with arrows, and the rest of the group are knocked unconscious with tranquilizing blow 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 has Jonah laid down on a rock altar, where she cuts out his eyes and tongue, and has his limbs dismembered and head cut off. As the tribe cooks Jonah's corpse, Alejandro reveals that the protest they carried out was fraudulent and had been paid for by Carlos, who owns a rival logging company.

Amy, Samantha, and Justine are tested with a sharpened instrument, revealing Justine as a virgin, causing her to be taken away. Using a ringing phone to distract the tribal watchman, Samantha escapes the cage, and runs to a canoe so that she can escape downstream. The next day, Justine is returned to the cage, covered in tribal paintings, meaning she is being prepared for a genital mutilation ritual later. The tribe brings the prisoners bowls of food to eat, and after Amy finishes hers, she notices a piece of skin on the bottom of the bowl, with one of Samantha's tattoos on it. Realizing she has just eaten her friend's entrails, Amy smashes the bowl and uses the shard to slit her own throat.

Knowing the tribe will cook Amy's body, Lars stuffs a bag of marijuana he had down her throat, hoping it will inebriate the tribe members once they consume her body, which it does. Justine and Daniel escape, but Lars is stunned with a tranquilizer dart by Alejandro, and falls back into the cage; Alejandro selfishly states that he would not be left alone to be eaten. Lars later awakens and attempts to escape, but is torn apart and eaten by the tribe. Justine and Daniel return to the site of the plane crash, where they find the crash victims impaled on poles. They hear a cell phone ringing in Kara's pocket, and as Justine takes it, the tribe shows up and captures them again.

Justine is prepared for her ceremony by the tribe, having her body painted and a crown put on her head, while Daniel is tied to a pole, has his limbs broken, and is covered in ants. Just before the ceremony is to take place, the sound of logging machinery is heard, and the entire tribe runs into the jungle to fight the loggers; the distraction allows Justine to escape with the help of a child member of the tribe who has sympathized with her. Daniel, suffering and on the brink of death, asks her to kill him, and when she says she cannot, the child tribe member cuts his throat. Alejandro begs her to let him out of the cage, but she leaves without him. Fleeing through the jungle, Justine encounters the loggers, who are armed with machine guns, and witnesses them shooting some the tribe members attempting to fight them. She uses Kara's cell phone to interrupt the event, and pretends she is filming them. They cease fire, and she is taken away from the logging site by helicopter to safety.

Back in New York, Justine recounts her experience to her father and UN associates. She lies and tells them that she was the sole survivor of the initial plane crash, that the tribe helped her out of the jungle, and that she witnessed no acts of cannibalism. Justine has a nightmare about Alejandro, and awakens in her dorm room. She looks out the bedroom window onto the campus, where another group of student activists are demonstrating for another cause with T-shirts with Alejandro's face on it.

Sometime after the credits roll, it is interrupted by a glitch of some sort showing a map. A phone ringing is overheard, followed by a conversation between Justine and Alejandro's sister, Lucia. During this she says she believes she has recognized him on a satellite GPS image which then zooms in for us to see a blurry man (believed to be Alejandro) standing in the jungle.

Cast

• Lorenza Izzo as Justine
• Ariel Levy as Alejandro
• Daryl Sabara as Lars
• Kirby Bliss Blanton as Amy
• Sky Ferreira as Kaycee
• Magda Apanowicz as Samantha
• Nicolás Martínez as Daniel
• Aaron Burns as Jonah
• Ignacia Allamand as Kara
• Ramón Llao as The Bald Headhunter
• Richard Burgi as Charles
• Matías López as Carlos
• 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. Roth wrote the script with Guillermo Amoedo. Production began in Autumn 2012 in Peru and Chile. In October 2012, it was announced that filming was set to begin in November in Peru. On October 25, Roth announced the full cast for the film. 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.

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.

Release

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

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. 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 to five minutes of footage edited out, and the untouched 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. 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 $1,646,509 overseas for a worldwide total of $8,838,800.

Critical reception

The film received mixed reviews from critics, some who praised the film's throwback vibe to earlier Italian cannibal horror films of the 1970s, as well as the cinematography and make-up effects, however the acting, screenplay, social commentary, and several boundary-pushing scenes were criticized. On Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds a rating of 33%, based on 63 reviews, with an average rating of 4.7/10. 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." On Metacritic, the film has a score of 38 out of 100, based on 19 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable reviews". CinemaScore audiences gave the film an average grade of "C-" on an A+ to F scale.

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." Todd Gilchrist of The Wrap gave the film a negative review, stating "Unfortunately, Roth’s abundant gore fails to either offend or exhilarate." 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 fucking blast."

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. 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."

Home media

The Green Inferno is set to be released on DVD and Blu-ray on January 5, 2016 from Universal Home Entertainment. The release will feature a director's cut and an audio commentary by Roth, López, Izzo, Burns, Blanton, and Sabara.

Sequel

On September 7, 2013, it was announced that a sequel would be produced, titled Beyond the Green Inferno and directed by Nicolás López.

External links

• The Green Inferno at IMDb
• The Green Inferno at Box Office Mojo
• The Green Inferno at Rotten Tomatoes