The film is “Knock Knock“, a thriller that we have been following since Lionsgate first picked-up the project during its amazingly successful film-festival run. Roth makes his contempt plain from the start, when Justine (Lorenza Izzo) wakes up to the sound of student activists hunger-striking for janitors’ health insurance out on the quad. But when the activists head home after successfully pulling off the stunt their small plane crashes in the jungle, and they’re either killed on the spot with arrows or taken captive by the same natives they’d just risked their lives to protect. If one thing is clear, it’s that Roth’s real anxieties lie in foreigners and their mysterious customs. Looks like it’s going to be a long day for poor old Keanu.
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“The Green Inferno” is of course a provocation. Roth’s Hostel movies are far more graphic, easily so much more unsettling, and even with eyeballs plucked from skulls or young white people getting butchered alive-or, grossest of all, implied female genital mutilation-here Roth turns away, editing around the gruesomeness or employing such jittery camera work that there isn’t much to actually see.
What’s the point of watching horror movies?
Time has not been kind to Eli Roth or what you might very well construe as his “craft”. At least getting eaten will shut them up.
What about the tribe being portrayed as nothing more than savage maniacs insane for human flesh? Coupled with a throwback, retro cannibalism storyline that is groan-worthy, Roth’s “The Green Inferno” is a flop of a horror film that overestimates gore for actual scares.
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And so The Green Inferno doesn’t add anything to, doesn’t try to build anything off of, doesn’t climb on the shoulders of what came before. (The clever, double-meaning title could be read as “hostile.”) He also helped open the floodgates for the hard-R subgenre known as “extreme horror” in some circles and “torture porn” in others, depending on where certain critics drew the line-and whether they were willing to have a line at all.
