As far as I know, Eli Roth’s long-on-the-shelf The Green Inferno is the lone 2015 theatrical release to utilize the threat of female genital mutilation as a subplot. Then again, I could be wrong — I still haven’t seen Minions.
Incensed over learning of the barbaric, Third World practice during a class lecture, petulant freshman college student Justine (Roth’s wife, Lorenza Izzo, Knock Knock) joins the campus activist group in order to Change the World, starting with the Amazon rainforest. (“Activism’s so freakin’ gay,” protests her roomie, an emo-pessimist played by singer Sky Ferreira.) Seeing as how good intentions pave the road to hell, the well-meaning Americans’ rickety, Buddy Holly model of a plane crashes in the jungle — one that plays home to a primitive tribe of cannibals. The few survivors are rounded up, caged in bamboo and await mealtime.
Collegians: It’s what for dinner.
From massive diarrhea to brutal dismemberment, Roth spares his cast — and, thus, the viewer — no humiliation, discomfort or pain-wracked demise, as anyone who has witnessed his Hostel saga knows all too well. Roth takes a lot of crap for reveling in the revolting, yet his films are about more than that and that alone — something that can’t be stated about most of today’s horror. Inferno, in particular, burns bright as an extreme, not-for-most experience that is legitimately disturbing, grimly humorous and frightening to consider — exactly upon which Roth counts. (Hell, I get travel anxiety just visiting Texas.) Only the CGI ants fall short of achieving the visceral reaction he doggedly works toward.
Otherwise, this film feels like one that I should not be watching. I felt the same about “bites” of the fabled Italian cannibal gross-out epics I manage to sample as a teenager — movies Roth is paying tribute to with transparence, so he can take that as a compliment. Lest there is any question about his objective, the end credits provide a veritable RIYL list of the subgenre’s sickest and most notorious offerings. Of considerably less use, those credits include the Twitter handles of cast and crew members, perhaps just to satisfy the gullible in proving the people they saw gutted onscreen are very much among the living. —Rod Lott