“Have you ever fantasized about saving a tribe?”
“Activism is so fucking gay,” sneers Kaycee, one of the many repellant characters in Eli Roth’s smug, cynical The Green Inferno. Right after Kaycee says the above line, she opines that activists are only performatively charitable in an effort to assuage their own white, suburban, Jewish guilt. (She then turns to a passerby, flashes her Star of David necklace, and says “I’m allowed to say that.” You can almost see Roth, himself a Jew, high-fiving himself for his audacity.) The thing is, The Green Inferno largely agrees with Kaycee; she is, notably, one of the few surviving characters by the end of the film, explicitly because she doesn’t engage in activism. Roth’s film seems opposed to the very idea of caring about people other than one’s self, and seeks to punish activists for the cardinal sin of trying. Which is why the activists in this film are written to be as hostile, condescending, and self-important as possible. Watching The Green Inferno is like reading a comment thread on a GamerGate video about why Anita Sarkeesian is humanity’s greatest monster. Well, buckle up, you soyboy betacuck SJWs, it’s time to talk about it.
Justine (Lorenza Izzo, Roth’s then-wife, who would also star in Knock Knock) is rudely woken up by the chants of campus activists. They’re on a hunger strike to get health insurance for the university’s custodial staff. It works, because The Green Inferno vastly overestimates the efficacy of campus protests. Justine finds herself drawn to Alejandro (Ariel Levy), the handsome leader of the strike. Her classmate Jonah (Aaron Burns), instantly smitten with Justine after hearing her bemoan the practice of female genital mutilation, invites her to the group’s next meeting, where they’ll plan their next protest. She goes, and this is where Roth really shows his hand in regards to how he feels about these lunatic tree huggers. Alejandro is pompous and condescending, relentlessly self-serious. Justine cracks a joke, to which Alejandro imperiously replies, “Only a freshman would show such insolence.” He then kicks her out of the meeting, leaving Justine to literally beg him the next day to be included.
The group heads to Peru to protest deep in the Amazon; their plan is to stop construction that would wipe out the homes of the Yajes tribe. The plan works, which beggars belief, but Justine is disillusioned by Alejandro when he does nothing to stop a militia member from putting a gun to her temple. The crew is jubilant on their way out of the rain forest, until their plane loses an engine, leading to a pretty horrific crash. Most of the group is killed, leaving only Justine, Alejandro, Lars, Jonah, Amy, Daniel, and Samantha left alive. In short order they’re tranquilized and taken prisoner by the very tribe they were trying to protect. See where compassion and good intentions gets you, libs?
Obviously The Green Inferno is an incredibly bloody, violent film. It’s an Eli Roth movie, after all, and the man didn’t come by his reputation as a talentless gore merchant without showing his bona fides. Some parts of it are effective, to be fair. As the group is bustled into a wooden cage, Jonah is systematically cut to pieces. It’s a harrowing sequence, but I feel like Roth is putting his thumb on the scale here, because in the hands of any director, watching a man’s eyes and tongue get ripped out and eaten before every one of his limbs, including his head, are hacked off would be stomach-churning. The practical effects are pretty incredible, and the performances by native non-actors are impressive as well. (Roth made up a bunch of bullshit in interviews, saying that the natives offered him an infant child as a thank you, and that Christian missionaries passed by the set on a boat and were horrified at all the gory props.)
Roth’s misanthropy is on full display once the group is imprisoned. Alejandro turns out to be – hold on to your hats – a bad man! He doesn’t care that Jonah was butchered, and even quips that he’ll keep the tribe fed for a week. (There are a number of fat jokes directed at Jonah, who is decidedly not fat.) He turns out to be a craven opportunist, admitting that the protest was a publicity stunt and that he was hired by a rival construction company. This is the same argument you run up against when bad actors on the far right insist that everyone at a BLM protest must be paid: they can’t fathom that you can do something for free just because you’re passionate about it. It’s not enough for Alejandro to be a liar and a coward; no, he has to turn full-on villainous. When the group attempts an escape, he stabs Lars with a dart, reasoning that if he’s not alone he’ll survive longer.
Oh, I forgot to mention that the group hides some marijuana in a corpse. The tribe eats it and gets thoroughly high. Lars takes this as his chance to escape, only to be swarmed by hungry tribesmen, who eat him alive because they have the munchies. That’s a real scene in a movie that you can watch on Earth.
31 Days of Fright has been an Eli Roth-free zone since the year of its inception. But I had fun watching Thanksgiving, a knowingly silly slasher film that Netflix quietly released in 2022. I thought I’d take a look at one of Roth’s most personal films. The Green Inferno is his love letter to Cannibal Holocaust (which, according to Roth, he screened for the native actors in this, who loved it and thought it was a comedy) and its director, Ruggero Deodato, who was brought before an Italian court who thought that actors were actually killed (he also made a cameo in Hostel Part II). Being brought before a court because of how gnarly your movie is must be every edgelord’s ultimate fantasy, and the grand irony of The Green Inferno is that it was paid attention to by no one. Good. This might be Eli Roth’s paean to the grisly exploitation flicks of his youth, but it’s nothing less than a sullen middle finger to the very idea of giving a shit about something.
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