A wanna-be activist chick joins up with some environmentalists who travel to the amazon to ambush a crew of corporate loggers with a live-streaming cyber protest. Shit doesn't totally go according to plan (or does it?), yet they still manage to avoid getting their heads blown off by the militia. Their victory celebration onboard their little plane is cut short by a crash that kills about half of them, leaving the rest to be kidnapped by a tribe of people-eating savages who mistake the do-gooders for the "evil" tree choppers. From there, you pretty much just watch the remaining captives get killed and eaten.
So, once you make it through the slow start, involving inane college kid babble and the botched protest, things actually start looking promising. The petrified group of Americans being herded into the tribal village made for a pretty strong and dire looking scene and the first guy to be gruesomely dismembered alive (after having his eyes and tongue yanked from his head and devoured...) was a delectably brutal bit of carnage, courtesy of some convincing and bloody practical FX work. Then, unfortunately, it's pretty much downhill from there with the remainder of the human livestock sitting in their bamboo cell and hatching their hair brained escape attempts in between idiotic scenes that only a frat boy-minded tard like Eli Roth would think fits into this type of movie. Shit like: a guy jerking off amidst bloodshed in order to "keep his mind clear", a chick with cartoonishly explosive diarrhea and getting the tribe high by jamming a bag of weed down the throat of a soon-to-be cooked corpse.
Aside from all this unfunny and out-of-place bullshit, the death scenes following the initial dismemberment are quite weak and ineffective. One of them kills herself in the cage. One demise is entirely off-screen and another involves lousy looking CGI bullet ants. That, on top of Roth's insufferable writing and one of the shittiest 'payoffs' I can recall in quite some time, "The Green Inferno" disintegrates quickly into a tragically unremarkable and all-too 'traditional' looking horror flick, encompassing a cast of genre stereotypes. I guess I was hoping for a few less punches pulled in the long-run. Granted, it was a safe bet that animal killing and rape-sprees weren't going to 'fly' as far as a studio film in this day n' age goes, but there was ample opportunity for some dick chopping that never played out! And the topic of female genital mutilation is prevalent, but still never comes to fruition... Again, it all comes down to that one stand-out death scene.
On the flip side, is it better than all the other "Poltergeist/Paranormal Activity" shit coming out? Absolutely. Without a doubt. Hell, it's way better than the "Hostel" movies by a long shot and props go out to Roth for at least attempting something like this and pushing as hard as he did to get it released in theaters so I can't bitch too much. I only wish it was more worth the effort and the wait. It's worth checking out for those who appreciate the top dogs of the 'cannibal exploitation' subgenre, such as "Cannibal Ferox", "Man from Deep River" and, of course, "Cannibal Holocaust". It's nowhere near as raw and visceral as those, but when is the last time you saw a NEW jungle cannibal flick?
On a side note of bonus douchebaggery, Roth decided to include the Twitter handles of the main cast and select crew members along with their credit at the end. Good idea since the popularity of social media sites has never been known to dwindle and accounts are never suspended or deactivated. Way to incorporate that timelessness into your movie, asshole. Twitter will surely remain eternally relevant.
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