The Green Inferno (2015)

Green Inferno is Eli Roth's recent film, a throwback to the old cannibal/gore-splatter flicks of the 70s and also a “social commentary” on how kids act today, which is totally something he should never be entrusted with. It's like letting a kid handle a firearm. Just nothing but bad things can happen.

Director: Eli Roth

Starring: Lorenza Izzo, Ariel Levy

IMDb

Co-written with Michelle.

This is also a sort of homage to old 70s exploitation/gore flicks like Cannibal Holocaust, which I haven't seen. But that movie was famous for the fact that the filmmakers killed live animals on screen. This is sort of comparable. What Roth does here is kill dignity and good taste in filmmaking on screen, so it's sort of the same.

We start off this movie with a bunch of kids at college protesting in, I guess, the one spot on campus they're allowed to do that – right outside the dorm room of main character Justine. She and her roommate talk about how Justine wants to go join this activist group, how she is attracted to the main guy leading the group, Alejandro, and, a few scenes later, how she wants to go raise awareness of female genital mutilation after learning about it in class.

Her roommate, played by pop star Sky Ferreira, being the only smart kid in the movie, rightfully says the activist group is a bunch of phonies looking for attention, the activist guy is a weirdo and it'd be almost impossible to get anything done by just flying to places by herself with this group and trying basically on-the-fly, sensational type shit. But Justine, being an idealistic social-justice-obsessed college kid, ends up joining the group and going on a mission to stop this rainforest jungle area from being bulldozed.

Ferreira: "It's not too late to get out of the movie like me. You won't see me again for most of it!"

This is Roth's attempt at social commentary – college kids are dumb and don't really care about the issues they pretend to care about! They're just like babies going through phases. Which is pretty condescending and awful, really. I bet Roth hasn't talked to a college kid except for trying to sleazily hit on the 21 year old bartender after a movie premiere and she turns him down. I imagine he then gets very self righteous with her and makes HER feel like the bad guy. I mean he's basically right on the edge of being a red-pill MRA fuckwad in this movie anyway with how douchey and arrogant his message is in this.

Honestly, it just goes on like this for a while... this Alejandro guy talks up Justine about going to save that rainforest and all that, saying that the only way to get people to change their behavior is to put cameras on them, humiliating them. Uh, not sure it's that simple, but okay, I get that Roth can't really process more complex ideas.

Amazingly, they actually somehow get a plane out there. There are a bunch of boring, time-wasting scenes of them eating lunch and then using the bathroom in the woods. I don't know why these scenes were included as they really accomplish nothing at all except padding out the runtime! So hooray for that I guess. But if he's under the impression that any of these characters are likable or interesting, well – they're not.

"Hey, I really think this interaction we're having is substantial and totally not just window dressing for the fact that I'll be dead soon."

I guess their plan is to tie themselves to these trees wearing creepy rape masks and refusing to move until the company with the bulldozers totally, for real stops their mission. I'm sure they won't just go back to doing it after these kids leave! Public humiliation trumps EVERYTHING, remember?

Anyway, then for some reason one of the guys puts a gun to Justine's head, because I suppose he really thought he would get away with it... then after everyone else puts their cameras on him, goading him to shoot Justine (what great people!), he stops and lets them all go free.

"Well, this has gone according to plans so far. I feel like I'm definitely helping!"

They then celebrate with drinks and toasts because again, they totally can't just pick up operations again as soon as the kids left. Activism is fun and easy! Why aren't MORE people doing this?!

I guess God really hated what they just did, though, as their plane immediately crashes as they try to leave, and several characters you don't remember the names of die instantly. RIP to whatever the fuck their names were. But unfortunately, most of the main characters survive.

As it happens every time you go into the jungle, they then immediately get kidnapped by a tribe of red-painted Amazonian savages who eat people! Super realistic! I'm just glad Roth has learned from his previous mistakes in movies like Hostel where he offended entire countries by portraying them as cabals for serial killers and evil people. This time, he's turning his bigotry sights on indigenous peoples who will never see the movie. So that's a way to sidestep outrage and be as despicable as he wants! And oh boy does he ever want to be a despicable piece of shit in this movie.

I suppose stereotyping is just faster. Roth is a busy guy.

One of the main selling points of this movie was, apparently, that it made people throw up in the theater while watching it. I guess there are a few gross scenes, but it's hardly anything THAT fucking extreme overall... maybe Roth just poisoned everyone's drinks and food at those showings he said they threw up at.

I mean, this one scene where they hack apart this guy is kind of gross and bloody in an old vintage 70s-gore way. And it sucks for me because I had money that this guy, the fat black guy who is nice to the main character and is actually sympathetic, would survive this horror movie. And now I'm out $20, so THANKS A LOT, ROTH, YOU PIECE OF SHIT.

But then there's no other scene like this in the movie. What happens in the rest of it? Endless scenes of them sitting in a cage bitching at each other? There's one scene where the savages give them some meat to eat and one girl says she's a vegetarian. Oh the hilarity! When will these apt, cutting social satirical scenes from Eli Roth ever lose their timeliness? Aren't college students pieces of shit?

Oh, and also, they find out that the whole 'Amazon save the rainforest' plot they came down for was just a PR stunt so they could film a video, and they didn't actually help the forest at all. Because in Eli Roth land, there's no actual idealism – anything that seems selfless and genuine is really just the opposite, a soulless marketing ploy. Just more of that awesome, pointed social commentary that rings true (if you're a dumb edgy teenager.)

In between all of this, there are several scenes of Justine being groomed, apparently, for genital mutilation – because isn't it ironic that what she was learning about in the beginning is what she's going through for real now?!? Life is just funny like that.

I guess Justine and this one other guy try to escape, which leads to a long ass scene of them running through the woods and what not. But then they get captured again, which made the whole thing pointless I guess. Justine is almost mutilated by these savages, but one random little boy saves her... why? Because the writers wrote themselves into a hole and had no idea how to save their story! Who cares if he has no reason to do it and we never get a real explanation? DEUS EX MACHINA TIME!

But hey, at least Justine gets to cosplay as a sexy version of the Pilsbury Dough Boy...

Which I'm sure is an actual fetish I am not going to look up at all...

Then she leaves Alejandro there to die, as he was a shitty person and deserved it I guess... in a better movie, there may have been some conflict over this, or character development. But in terrible horror movies, it's just hollow meaningless revenge because the audience didn't like the guy either. Even when she gets home, she just lies and says everyone died. I guess she has a dream about him coming back and she's a cannibal now and bites him?

And here we come to the movie's true message - if you're an activist but don't really believe in your cause, you'll end up in a cage in the jungle left to die. So relatable, so timely.

But that doesn't really make sense anyway.

Michelle also pointed out how weird it is that Justine defends the tribe at the end, claiming the cannibals were actually nice to her and protected her. Odd choice, being that it doesn't make a difference – they all get killed in the end, so who is she protecting here? It's like Roth is trying to have this statement about how she wants to stick to the cause even though it's a lie, just so she can feel better about herself or something. Which is just more lameness really.

The movie then has a short end-credits scene where Alejandro's sister calls Justine and says satellite images found Alejandro living out in the jungle himself now, I guess... which is weird that the cameras picked that up and nobody has saved him yet, but who am I to say? It's cute that the movie thinks we give a shit about any of these terrible characters.

There's like one half decent scene of gore in this, and it's early on and there isn't anything else like it again. The characters in this are unlikable and the social commentary attempts are so bad that it's almost satirical – like I really don't know how anyone thought this was clever, the tip of the iceberg being the asinine dialogue that turns every character into a mouthpiece for Roth's message - it's super transparent and shitty writing. The message is a lot of sneering douche-bro condescension at some kind of strawman idea of what college kids and activists are like. Everything is very negative – as if being this cynical is a substitute for actual intelligent discourse. I don't think it is.

Got to love Roth's defense of the movie against those offended by his portrayal of indigenous cultures... you can read the whole thing here, but these are the parts I found funny:

“My film, however, is about bandwagon activism, or "slacktivism," which is people jumping in on social media and retweeting causes they actually know nothing about (something these activists seem ready to do with my film). The whole idea of the kids saving the rainforest only to be eaten by the tribe they saved is a metaphor for how people are shamelessly consumed by their vanity and need for validation on social media. These kids in the movie care, but they care more about getting recognized for caring.

The people who seem to publicly care how these people are portrayed are people who want to be portrayed as caring people.

If everyone stopped their ideas because they were worried about offending people or sparking discussion then there would be no stories to tell. In short, take your cause seriously, but take my film for what it is — a movie.”

I'll translate for you: “My film is a serious thing with a real message and anyone who doesn't like it is part of the problem! But really, it's just a silly movie, why are you taking it so seriously?!”

What a load... this is just a dumb, poorly written film. It's crass and ordinary and doesn't have anything intelligent to say, nor anything of value entertainment-wise. Just awful. Avoid this.

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Vile (2011)

Well, anything has got to be better than Curse of the Zodiac. Even if it IS a big ball of torture-porny nothing like Vile…

Director: Taylor Sheridan

Starring: Eric Jay Beck, April Matson

IMDb

I’ll just get this out of the way now: This movie is nothing but gore! Any film made solely for the purposes of showing off gore and sacrificing any plot or tension in the meantime is just worthless shit and Vile is no exception. Its artistic value is nil - anything just existing to show off a bunch of gore has to be done with certain levels of drama or comedy to it or else it’ll just be tasteless nonsense, which THIS FILM definitely is.

There - now I don’t have to bitch about any of that in the rest of the review, as it is becoming passe to even talk about with every single piece of shit film that does these things. Instead now we can have a funnier review.

We start off this brilliant masterpiece with a tramp stamp of the movie company’s logo above some woman’s ass, which is an incredibly befitting way to start the whole thing off as I’m sure most of this movie came from someone’s ass. Also, what, the production company is Vile Entertainment, Inc.? Is this movie so worthless that it couldn’t find anywhere else to distribute itself but starting a whole new company under its own name?

I haven't seen a logo for a production company this good since the last Metallica album cover looked like the inside of a shit-covered toilet bowl.

If that wasn’t confusing enough on its own, we then get a Gandhi quote about how science is just hurting people with no remorse. Because Gandhi quotes totally fit with asinine torture porn horror movies!

Or not. Fucking seriously? Are you just on a mission to make sure NOTHING in this movie makes sense with anything else?

Then we get a three-minute scene of a guy we don’t know being tortured by someone else we don’t know. I’ll spoil all the dialogue of this scene for you: “Mmph! Mmmmpfh! MMMMPPPPFFFHHH!”

Get that tennis ball out of his mouth, I can't hear what he's saying!

Oh boy, am I ever sold on this movie now! A scene with nothing going on but torture is the best way to open up a film! I’m excited to see the rest now.

We then get a bunch of morons sleeping in a field camping or something - either that, or they just got lost and their short attention spans led them to start a new life out there. We find out that one of the girls, Tayler, is pregnant and hasn’t told her boyfriend yet. She goes and attempts to tell him and instead they have a conversation about how running around in a forest sounds sexy. Dammit, are you gonna force me to make ANOTHER Blair Witch joke?! I can’t escape it!

We also get this gem from the other girl: “You’re pregnant, it’s not cancer. He’ll be overjoyed.” Oh, really? Pregnancy and cancer aren’t the same thing? Is that how it works now? Please bestow upon us more of your erudite gems of eternal fucking wisdom.

"Did you also know that donating to the Red Cross is NOT the same thing as enslaving hundreds of Jews in concentration camps?"

Later, at a gas station, boyfriend Nick lets some older woman hitch a ride with them to her car, which she claims has run out of gas. Tayler gets extremely jealous for no reason and starts bitching Nick out for it - like he really had any incentive to do anything with the woman or even showed signs of being interested in her. Oh, wait, he didn’t. This is just shitty writing. Can’t make any interesting characters? Just have ‘em be jealous and bitchy at one another for no reason, all the time! Bam, instant drama!

"Allow me to be suspicious of you for no reason. WE HAVE A GOOD RELATIONSHIP!"

So in a surprising twist, the lady they picked up is actually kidnapping them to go be tortured and stuff! Wow! If I hadn’t seen any horror movies in the last 40 years, maybe I’d actually be surprised by that! I do have to laugh at the way she does it though - she says she wants to give them a sample of perfume, then comes back wearing a gas mask and sprays gas into the car. That’s pretty fucking stupid. But funny as well, I admit.

Those car-to-car perfume saleswomen are just getting pushier and pushier.

They wake up in some old house that looks more like the filmmakers just asked one of their grandmas to use their house because they had no fucking money to get a better location. They meet another group of people who I am pretty sure got lost while filming an entirely separate torture porn shit film. It’s happening; they’re all converging into one giant interchangeable mass! Run for your lives!

"We got lost from the cast of Hostel 4: Beating the Dead Horse with Another Dead Horse. Can you help us find our way home?" Also we never learn anything about these characters; not where they're from or how they know each other or anything. Then again, this would have just made the movie longer, so...go ahead and just have them be two-dimensional cardboard cutouts.

They all notice something weird - apparently they all have wires hooked into their brains. Apparently they also find this videotape of a woman telling them the backstory of the film exposition-dump style: they need to cause pain to one another to make some chemical come out of the wires and into this other meter, for some science experiment some random, unidentified group is doing.

Uh, pretty fucking sure there are other ways to do this besides kidnapping people to torture them. You couldn’t find any other way to achieve the result you wanted except to kidnap like 10 people and put them in a room and make them torture one another? There’s really no other way you could have done it? And I’m really supposed to believe that this group who can fund a science experiment to hook wires into peoples’ brains perfectly without causing any neurological damage to extract chemicals, can’t get any more efficient way to kidnap those people in the first place than just sending one woman out to trick people in the middle of the night at run-down gas stations on country roads. Uh huh. Sure.

Oh who cares, nobody put any thought into this. So I guess everyone just starts immediately freaking the fuck out, not bothering to have any rational thought. Bradley Cooper here, afraid of starring in Guardians of the Galaxy 2, pulls his wires out and immediately drops to the floor dead:

Oh, you’re saying that wasn’t what happened? Pfft...next you'll be telling me that WASN'T really Bradley Cooper at all! Well I say, I have never heard such baseless accusations.

They all vote to just start beating the crap out of this one guy. The scene seems ridiculous at first, especially when after it’s done the one guy is just nonchalantly like “shit, this isn’t working.” But just picture Ulli Lommel in the beating victim’s place and it’ll be OK.

There’s also this one other girl, who I'm going to call Yellow Shirt Girl based off the color of her shirt, who is completely insane and horrible all the time. After Bradley Cooper-wannabe kills himself, she starts asking why none of the men will do more work to stop what’s going on. Mr. Take-a-Beating gets snarky with her and tells her he doesn’t want to hear any feminist crap. She freaks out on him and starts screaming so as to hurt the audience’s ears, but really I don’t see how asking men to do more work is feminist crap, so I think she should really be pissed off about the guy’s completely back-asswards view of feminism.

So then they strap Mr. Take-a-Beating to the table - not sure why they strap him down as he has volunteered… - and start whaling on him. They yank out some fingernails, burn him with an iron and beat his legs up. Yellow Shirt Girl gets way too into it though as she somehow musters up the strength to lift the guy up and break his leg clear in two pieces on the edge of the table. What, did she just eat a lot of spinach?

Throughout the next twenty-odd minutes of torture nonsense, Yellow Shirt Girl constantly tries to facilitate the torture, yelling at people that it’s THEIR TURN to be tortured...so why isn’t SHE just volunteering to go? Because having likable characters would ruin this movie’s main goal of doing nothing right and flaunting it in our faces like a two dollar whore’s underwear.

Oh and there’s also a scene where one kid suggests to Yellow Shirt Girl that having sex could also produce the same chemicals as being tortured. For some reason this is just glazed over throughout the entire film, which is weird because you’d think THAT would have been preferable to torturing one another, but whatever! Yellow Shirt Girl is disgusted by this and says she’d rather be tortured than have sex with that guy. Yup, because having consensual sex with some guy who was just asking with no threat of violence or harm is SO MUCH WORSE than being tortured! Fuck this.

The movie also has a habit of using really serious, dramatic music over the torture scenes, which I would say is retarded, but as my brain has been turned to apple sauce by this movie, I’ll say it works! After all, if it’s good enough for Lifetime movies and Hallmark commercials, it’s good enough to play over your shitty Saw-wannabe movie. There's also some other scenes of pregnancy-related drama, and honestly, who ever thought THAT was gonna be a good idea? Yeah I'm real sure this shitty gore-movie has what it takes to pull off a sensitive topic like pregnancy drama well.

It's just what I was saying before; this film has no idea what it's doing. Nothing fits. The pregnancy storyline tries to evoke drama but that is offset by the ridiculous plot and over the top gore going on. It never meshes together well at all.

Yellow Shirt Girl spills boiling water all over the floor in an attempt to make the pain meter rise higher and get them all out of there faster. It doesn’t work, and they end up tying her up. She gets loose and accidentally kills one of the other girls. Her boyfriend then proceeds to go crazy and torture Yellow Shirt with everyone else in tow.

I know doing this helps them get to the right level of pain chemicals or whatever it is, but c’mon, it WAS kind of an accident...not sure that really means you have to torture her to death out of pure rage. I mean, hate her, yeah, but how does torturing her to death solve anything? It’s just weird because it’s played off more like we’re supposed to be happy they tortured and killed this girl, rather than feeling disgusted at what they’ve been driven to - I know they were TRYING to make it seem like the latter, but the film is so tonally confused it doesn’t work at all.

Then after that the videotape says they’re good now and can leave. They have to put their heads into this contraption on the wall which will remove the wires in their heads. Then they can leave through the door. It all goes pretty well until this guy is randomly revealed to be evil:

So if this guy was evil the whole time and working with the scientists, why didn't he tell them how to get the pain meter up higher and higher? Why did he instead let them beat the crap out of each other first in ways that did very little to further their goals? How come he even had to be in there at all? I mean, there's just no sense to any of this.

Yeah, because I guess they needed someone to be the villain. I get the idea they didn’t intend this guy to be evil at all; they just hit a wall in the writing process and had to choose someone at random. I mean there really is no fucking reason this guy would be evil - it’s never even really explained why he had to be in there with them, or what his real motivations are. He’s just evil! How did that magnificent writing process go again?

Oh yeah.

So Tayler gets trapped back inside the house and the whole torture-timer starts all over again, making her have to torture herself to get back out. It takes her about two minutes of screentime, and all she does is stick her hand in a pot of boiling water and impale her hand on a nail - really? This was all the time it would have taken them to get out? Why did we even have the rest of this fucking movie then? It could’ve been over in five minutes!

This is just the hazing ritual for most sororities these days; man up! Or...woman up, I guess it would be instead...

Unfortunately it’s deus ex machina time, as then some other crap happens that results in the chemicals in the wires in their heads killing them now. Tayler dies, Nick stabs the on-a-whim bad guy to death and then walks out the door...somehow surviving even though I thought the point was that they were dying now. This whole sequence takes up like 10 minutes of screentime, when you add in close-ups of Tayler crying and Nick and Mr. Baddie-Bad-Guy bantering - it’s really just like they didn’t have enough material to sustain a full movie, so instead they just padded everything out for no reason. You know, like most good filmmakers do.

"Quick, we need more padding! Hold this shot and have some melodramatic music playing over it to make it seem meaningful and shit!"

We then get a scene of Nick in some diner ordering food. He sees the older woman from before who kidnapped them outside, follows her to the middle of nowhere where she’s trying to do it again, and kills her. So what, he didn't bother alerting law enforcement to what happened in that house? No investigations were done there? What about the parents or families of the other people who died? No questions asked about their disappearances or deaths? I just don't think eating breakfast at some random diner is the highest priority after the whole mess was over! Then again breakfast IS the most important meal of the day.

Oh well. Our hero, a murderer who didn't even tell the police about a highly sophisticated (or somewhat, anyway) torture operation kidnapping innocent people, thus damning more people to suffer similar fates, then sits in a car looking super serious and another song plays to close the film, beginning with the line “FUCK IT!”

That's the weight of this whole ridiculous movie settling on his shoulders forever.

Yeah, I think that about sums up the attitude of the filmmakers while making this garbage: fuck it!

I mean this whole thing is just nonsense. It’s completely valueless. There’s very little direction here, no atmosphere to speak of, the acting sucks, the story is contrived...there’s basically no reason to watch this thing. The fact that they managed to do exactly nothing right, achieving absolutely nothing they set out to, is a near miracle of horribleness though, and does tend to lend a certain degree of unintentional comedy to this. However, I don't think that justifies its existence. Fire the space lasers and destroy every copy of this movie now!



Images copyright of their original owners, I own none of them.