Review: The Green Inferno (2016)

They say curiosity killed the cat. Well, I have two very adventurous cats and it hasn’t killed them yet. One of them did go missing for 4 weeks last year though and that nearly did him in. Anyway. Yes, that title is correct! Despite being made in 2013, The Green Inferno didn’t get a wide UK release until February 2016! I have never seen an Eli Roth movie before, nor do I enjoy horror movies, but as part of my quest this year to leave my movie comfort zone, my curiosity got the better of me.  Here is where we differ,  Allie is braver than me.  I don't like horror movies at all, particularly anything that makes me jump.  I don't mind blood and guts and gore but if someone is in the wardrobe, I'm out!  However, I went through a phase of watching trailers on YouTube a few months back and this popped up, here's little ol' me thinking 'ooooh a new superhero movie' and then the trailer  played...nope nope nope nope nope.  So needless to say, I haven't watched the film!

The plot is simple enough. A group of students travel to the Amazon to save the rainforest from being bulldozed, things don’t really go to plan, and they find themselves captured by a tribe of cannibals, armed with tranquilizer darts. Is it wrong to have felt like the intro was taking too long? ‘Just get on the plane!’ I wanted to shout, before feeling like a terrible human being. If I found myself going into this movie blind, there’s enough not-so-subtle hints about what’s about to unfurl. I had my legs firmly crossed at the video shown in class of genital mutilation. Ew.

Maybe my love of Game of Thrones and Vikings has desensitised me a little, but this wasn’t as bad as I was expecting. Okay, let me put that into perspective. What I was expecting was for the gore to be so bad, my dinner would come back to say hi and I’d have to switch the movie off. So yeah, it’s not that bad. It’s still pretty grim though, I’m thinking eyeballs specifically. It was quite well done too, it didn’t look fake in the slightest.

What half bugged and half amused me though, was how dorky this movie was in places. Minor spoilers in the rest of this paragraph, sorry. One of the characters acquired a bag of free weed earlier in the movie, and decided the best plan to escape once captured was to stuff this bag of weed down the body of one of their dead companions. Once the cannibals started cooking the body, the whole tribe would be so high that the rest of the group could escape, no problems. That was funny enough, but what was even funnier was when they high wore off, and the cannibals got the munchies. Worst. Idea. Ever. But hilarious.

So, what I learnt was that Horror is alright, and that it’s only jump scares that put me off the genre. I’m not saying I’m a converted gore fan, but I’m certainly open to watching more movies like this. I’d just like a better plot, and for the movie to not follow the typical death order that this one does. You could guess who would die in what order within the first 10 minutes if you wanted.  I still don't think I can bring myself to watch it, even if it is just gore rather than jumps...these faces terrify me!

Is there going to be a Green Inferno 2? What was with that ending, anyway? The dream sequence? I was sat all smug having not been scared once, and then that moment quite literally made me throw my cup of tea all over myself!