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julcaesar2000
Reviews
Unfit: The Psychology of Donald Trump (2020)
Fascinating Psychology
I was very impressed with the depth that this documentary goes into to explain Trump and his political career. A major reason for its depth is because of the credentials of the professionals that speak with authority on matters of psychology and politics.
It's fascinating and scary.
The Green Inferno (2013)
A Nerveless Tribute to Italian Horror Nasties
Eli Roth's "The Green Inferno" is a movie so ineptly made - so poorly executed - that it's almost not worth writing about but for the fact that you might be tempted to actually watch it yourself. You should know what you're in for.
Director Eli Roth has a clear penchant for gore and exploitation. His movie "Hostel" helped launch a new wave of torture porn flicks in the United States. Now comes "The Green Inferno" which is a kind of riff on the old Italian splatter movies of the 1970s and 80s. The movie follows a group of student activists into the Peruvian jungle as they attempt to stop corporate developers from destroying the wilderness and its inhabitants. When their plane crash lands in the middle of the forest, they are captured and put up on the menu of a tribe of cannibals.
It's a gore fest. Nothing wrong with that. I can appreciate a splatter film. Those old Italian horror movies, in particular Ruggero Deodato's "Cannibal Holocaust", were infamous (and still are) for their extreme violent content and gore and scenes of graphic nudity and misogynist sexual violence. They were midnight movie dream material, and they were extremely effective at making audiences queasy and uncomfortable. Sleaze is the point.
But, this new movie is something else, and I am surprised it has even seen the light of day, with a theatrical release no less. Evidently, this movie sat on the shelf in post-production limbo for about two years before finally getting distributed by Blumhouse Productions. "The Green Inferno" screams straight-to-VOD release.
The first thing you will notice is the acting. To describe the work on display here as amateur is being kind. Think of the caliber of acting you might encounter in porn and you get a pretty good idea of what it's like in "The Green Inferno." To be fair to the actors, the scenes and lines they are given to work with are so poorly written that no one could have made this material work. Consider the following gems of dialogue:
As the students board the plane that will inevitably crash, one character remarks, "Eh, I hate small planes I always get this feeling that they're going to crash."
After the tribe of cannibals dismembers one of their friends - gouging out his eyeballs and chopping off every limb of his body - and locks the rest of the students in a bamboo cage for future tortures, one character actually says, "We have to get out of here." Yeah.
But, the acting isn't the only problem here. The second thing you will notice is an uneven and rather jarring mixed tone of humor and horror. Consider the following:
At one point, one of the girls, while locked up with her friends, realizes with alarm that she needs to defecate. With much commotion, she goes to the corner of the cage and violently releases herself.
After one character is brutally killed by the cannibals, one of the students starts masturbating in the cage in front of all his friends. "What the hell are you doing," someone asks him. "Relieving stress," he responds.
In fact, we don't care about these characters enough to care what happens to them. It is impossible to believe that real people would act this way or say these things in these circumstances. So, what is it that we feel when these characters start getting chopped up? Revulsion? Admiration for the technical effects?
Admittedly, Roth is known for infusing his horror with moments of absurd humor, and it's possible that this is all intentional folly. The movie, perhaps, is intended as nothing more than a repository of absurd potty humor and pot and masturbation jokes. Certainly it is not intended to be taken seriously.
But, Roth is a director who loves and is inspired by exploitation horror. If he wanted to pay tribute to those old video nasties by making his own, he should have had the nerve to go all the way. The humor in "The Green Inferno" doesn't feel deliberate. It feels like the cop-out of a director who lacks the skill to muster even a shred of dramatic tension or the pang of terror at the prospect of being eaten alive.
On a final note, I want to bring attention to a peculiar obsession of this movie - female genital mutilation. One character is faced with the prospect of undergoing this horrific procedure at the hands of the cannibals. In what I can only assume is a ridiculous show of feminist solidarity, the movie features a female tribe leader and, earlier, a set of male genitals in danger of being bitten by a spider (equal opportunity endangerment?), lest the movie be accused of the type of misogyny its Italian predecessors were guilty of. As if that weren't the least of its worries.