When it came to the future of broadcast media, there were two highly prescient films released in the ’70s. The first, of course, was Network, Paddy Chayefsky’s acerbic slam at television news, and it’s desire to dress up sensationalism as serious journalism for the sake of entertainment. It took home several Oscars and remains a benchmark of satiric commentary. In fact, it was so far ahead of its time that its future is still trying to catch up to it.
The other movie was far less celebrated. In fact, it was banned in several countries and got its director arrested on fears that the horrors committed onscreen were real. Whenever anyone hears the title, they automatically assume a snuff film or gross-out splatter fest and fail to recognize its narrative subversion. You see, Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust is more than just a collection of animal atrocities and faked flesh eating. Like Network, it called out a media hellbent on turning reality into programming.
Narratively, Cannibal Holocaust sees a group of TV executives arguing over whether or not a collection of footage found after a documentary film crew goes missing should be viewed by the public. Their cleverly cloying back and forth is interspersed with scenes of shockingly graphic violence — and that was the point. The suits smell ratings. Everyone else thinks the idea is reprehensible. After all, who’d want to watch people actually dying in horrifying ways as part of their nightly living room repast?
The answer is found in the year 2015. We are awash in repugnant reality TV, not too far from Deodato’s death proofs. So it makes sense that a homage happy Eli Roth has decided to revisit the concept for his highly controversial new film, The Green Inferno. In fact, you can’t watch this combination of social commentary and blatant blood feast and not think of those key Cannibal Holocaust moments. But the problem this film has is not one of brutality, but of premise. Instead of criticizing something outside the storyline, Roth decides to mock his characters, making it almost impossible for us to care about their outcome.
In his mind, white privilege and the clueless Caucasian desperate to save the world from itself are much more viable topics today than any other item of contemporary popular culture he can take a swipe at. Roth then reinvents the jungle gross-out by turning the tale into one of indigenous revenge. Our Queen of Entitlement is Justine (Lorenza Izzo), a college girl whose Daddy works at the UN. She looks at the planet in a passive aggressive manner, shocked by the concept of female circumcision (as well she should be) while pointing fingers at the victims as well as the violators.
When she hooks up with campus rebel hunk Alejandro (Ariel Levy), her fate is set. He wants to head down to Peru and save the “natives” and rainforest from being exploited and killed by corporate carpetbaggers. Gathering together a group of laughable victim fodder, they all take a plane south. It crashes. People die. Others are captured. It’s not long before eyes are gouged out, female parts are violated, and humans are cooked as part of a primitive pattern of CG-enhanced violence.
Now, The Green Inferno is not the goriest horror film in recent memory. Martyrs, and the recent Evil Dead remake are far more graphic. Roth does the unthinkable (perhaps to earn a mainstream release) by cutting away from the blood at times, while other deaths occur off camera. When he does let the lens settle in on some splatter, the results are disgusting, but derivative. His Hostel pushed boundaries. The Green Inferno crawls safely back behind the lines.
But again the bigger problem here is our lack of investment. We don’t care what happens to Justine and Alejandro and their friends. We can’t find a reason to worry about their fate. Right up front, Roth is telling us that these meatheads deserve their destiny, that their lack of perspective and their over self involvement means that they deserve to die. Fair enough, but then what are we waiting for? Why spend half the movie in setting up this situation? Cannibal Holocaust played everything straight. The satire came from the concepts being discussed back in the skyscrapers of the city.
The Green Inferno forgets this. By making our victims so obviously awful, we find ourselves back in slasher film mode. In those ’80s horror classics, it wasn’t about the narrative or who dies next — it was all about the killings. Eventually, we forgot about the characters and why we were supposed to care and simply waiting for the next inventive death to happen. Roth doesn’t get this. He still thinks he’s making the post-modern version of Deodato’s cinematic statement. He couldn’t be more wrong.
Granted, in today’s era of middling macabre, where shock and being startled has replaced suspense and any real sense of dread, The Green Inferno is like lightning. It’s flashy and bright, but ends up quickly dissipating. Forty years ago, filmmakers knew how to have their creative cake and make you eat it too. Today, with Roth’s revisionism, it’s all wasted potential and a distinct feeling of “Why bother?”