Eli Roth’s latest movie, The Green Inferno, was on my list of horror movies to watch way back when I heard rumors that it had been investigated for actual cannibalism while it was filming. I have no idea if these rumors are true, but hearing a movie was thought to have actual death in it intrigued me. Okay, maybe I’m super creepy, but that seemed like a ringing endorsement to me. Now normally I steer clear of spoilers, but this time I can’t. Beware, here there be spoilers!

The movie actually starts nowhere near the Amazonian jungles that it’s title hints at, instead we are dropped into a college dorm room in what I’m pretty sure is New York City. We meet Justine, who just happens to be learning about indigenous cultures (technically her class is about Africa, but the behaviors are superimposed on the natives we see later in the movie) in one of her classes, and a group of activists, who have decided to go to Peru to stop developers from tearing down trees and destroying villages in their path to progress. Sounds like kismet right, well not only is Justine kind of learning about tribal life, but her father is a lawyer for the United Nations. She goes with her new activist buddies to stop the developers and learns that their whole plan is to live stream themselves being chained to the equipment and trees that the developers are using. That would probably be okay if the construction company didn’t have an armed militia working to ensure this sort of thing doesn’t happen.

Turns out Justine was being used by the leader of the activists because the militia won’t kill someone connected to the UN, which winds up getting the kids just arrested and put back on their plane. This would be a pretty boring movie if that was all that happened so the plane winds up dramatically crashing in the middle of nowhere. That’s when the cannibal tribe appears. Things get pretty crazy pretty fast. The leader of the activists, Justine, two other girls(I’m pretty sure they are a couple), a guy with a crush on Justine, a sort of pot head, and the tech planner for this event are all captured and wind up being caged. I honestly don’t remember the characters names I’m sorry. Well the cannibals start getting hungry and dig into their captives and it does get pretty gory, like really gory. All the gore eventually leads to our final girl, Justine, escaping and getting back home. When she’s there she completely lies about the trip in an attempt to gain sympathy for indigenous tribes. Oh and random fun fact, in the credits members of the cast and crew had their Twitter names listed beside their names. I’d never seen that in a movie before and I wound up watching part of the credits just because I was intrigued.

Maybe there’s something wrong with me, but I wasn’t really that freaked out by the movie. The build up to the cannibals was pretty long and it all just happened so fast. I did close my eyes when they tore apart the first victim, they ripped his eyes out and I just can’t watch stuff happen to eyeballs. I don’t know why, but it freaks me out more than anything else. It was really easy to guess what was going to happen in the movie, there’s a PowerPoint in Justine’s class that tells you two things that are definitely going to happen while the kids are in the village, and when the plane first takes off one girl says she’s always afraid that small planes will crash. It was definitely gory, but I didn’t enjoy this movie as much as I thought I would. The intro seemed to drag and once we got to the village so much death happened so fast that it just turned into what I’m pretty sure is best defined as murder porn. Sorry guys, but I just wasn’t into it. I prefer my cannibals well dressed and my teens in more slasher style peril.

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