Guess who's on the menu tonight? PEOPLE. Above is the trailer for the new Eli Roth film The Green Inferno, courtesy of Moviefone, a down-and-dirty horror film about a group of Americans who foolishly decided to visit Peru. Don't go to Peru, idiots. Nothing but cannibals there!
This is actually a remake, of sorts, to 1988's Natura Contro, which also went by the titles The Green Inferno and Cannibal Holocaust II, because all the most awesome horror movies have multiple titles. It's directed by Antonio Climati, who only directed documentaries, though he served as a cinematographer for Mondo Cane, Goodbye Uncle Tom and Umberto Lenzi's Primal Rage. As an old-school horror fan who has seen Cannibal Holocaust a couple of times, I have never ever heard of Natura Contro, which apparently has no real connection to Cannibal Holocaust other than the marketing hook of the title. Like all bleak horror films from the seventies and eighties, this one's got a pretty upbeat trailer. Should you be surprised that it's Not Safe For Work? No. No you shouldn't.
And hey, take the afternoon off... the whole thing's on YouTube!
This is actually only Roth's fourth effort as a director, following Cabin Fever and the two Hostel movies. But he's built a heavy rep working on projects like Grindhouse and the Netflix series Hemlock Grove. It's apparently given him the license to call himself a "Horror Master" as he does in the trailer, which is totally different from being a "Master Of Horror." If you were palling around with Tarantino and making movies with Selena Gomez, you'd probably call yourself some sort of master as well.
The trailer boasts that Roth shot this in the deepest jungles of Peru, with a tribe that has never been filmed before. Of course, he's using them as spooky fodder for a scary movie, but progress is progress, right? If anything, Roth is paying homage to the years of video nasties and grindhouse classics that exploited third world horror for escapist kicks. But Roth still has a great talent that his films often squander with cheap gags and a lack of confidence in the overall message. Roth's horror masterpiece is out there, waiting to be unleashed onto the public. Could this be it?
