31 Days of Horror 2015: Cannibals

3. The Green Inferno (2015)

I'm not a fan of Eli Roth. I liked "Cabin Fever," but he tried my patience with "Hostel," and "Hemlock Grove" is just laughable. However, his latest movie, "The Green Inferno," made in the tradition of 1980s Italian cannibal movies like "Cannibal Holocaust" and "Cannibal Ferox," gets everything right. Few outside the small subset of horror fans familiar with the Italian cannibal genre will appreciate it, but for those of us who know the names Ruggero Deodato and Umberto Lenzi, "The Green Inferno" is a rare treat. It takes all the essential elements of the genre and updates them for 2015.

Italian cannibal movies typically follow a group of American filmmakers who travel to the Amazon to document an isolated tribe that ends up eating them. In Roth's update, the characters are a group of American college students who travel to the jungle in Peru and chain themselves to trees to stop loggers and save an isolated tribe that lives in the path of the bulldozers. They document the event with their mobile phones and broadcast live streams through the Internet. They stop the loggers, but the small plane flying them out of the jungle crashes, and they are soon captured and eaten by the tribe they were trying to protect.

It wouldn't be a cannibal movie if it didn't revel in sadistic gore, but "The Green Inferno" also satirizes wealthy college students with simplistic ideas about solving the world's problems. Moreover, because the gruesome acts committed by everyone involved--the natives, the loggers, their guards, and the college students-- it also suggests that there's a savage lurking in all of us. If this is a sign of where Roth's career is heading, then I excited to see what he'll do next.

4. Cannibal Holocaust (1980)

It had been several years since I'd seen an Italian cannibal movie, and while watching "The Green Inferno," I 

realized it was time to revisit Ruggero Deodato's "Cannibal Holocaust." It's a better movie than I remembered and also more gruesome. The words "disturbing" and "fucked up" are used to describe horror movies so often that that they have become meaningless, but they apply here. The warning label about "extreme violence" is not a gimmick.

  

"Cannibal Holocaust" is sometimes called the first "found footage" film, and more than half of the movie consists of footage filmed by an American documentary crew who were eaten by their subjects. As you watch the footage, you realize that they got what they deserved. The flesh eating scenes are very gory and often hard to watch, particularly the scene in which a man's penis is cut off. However, it's not the gore that makes the film so disturbing; it's the behavior of the film crew as they cruelly slaughter animals, and harass, rape, and kill the members of the isolated tribe they discover. The "civilized" Americans are much more savage than the "primitive" natives. It left me feeling a bit sick, and it'll be another several years before I watch this one again.

31 Days of Horror: Day 20 - V/H/S (2012)

I’m not really a fan of the “found footage” technique for horror movies.  Although it’s meant to create hyper-realism, it often has the opposite effect because for  narrative coherence scenes have to be filmed that wouldn’t have been filmed if the footage were really authentic.  This makes the movies seem more artificial and contrived than they would be if they had eschewed the found footage technique and taken a more traditional approach.  Another problem is that they too often feature an annoying character who won’t turn off the damn camera even when his friends are being brutally murdered.

The technique works well in “The Blair Witch Project” (1999) because it makes sense for the camera to be rolling throughout the production of a documentary.  It works even better, however, in “Cannibal Holocaust” (1980), an Italian horror movie about an expedition of anthropologists who are eaten by cannibals while studying a tribe somewhere in the Amazon rainforest.  Their colleagues learn about their fate from the reels of film that they find when they go looking for the missing group.  Only about 30 minutes of “Cannibal Holocaust” consists of found footage, giving it an authenticity that’s often lacking in movies that rely entirely on this technique.

“V/H/S” is both a found footage movie and a horror anthology, and the combination of these two techniques results in five very effective segments, a few of which I found truly horrifying, even though I’m rarely frightened by horror movies anymore.  The found footage technique works because the segments are so short that it’s entirely believable that the events would have been captured on film spontaneously. Each segment was made by a different horror director, and three of them explore unique ways of capturing the footage, avoiding the necessity of having a character holding a video camera at all times.

In “Amateur Night,” the first and best segment, a character wears glasses containing a miniature video camera, so everything he sees is recorded.  He and his friends go out to a bar to pick-up girls and capture the experience on video, but one girl is not what she seems.  “The Sick Thing that Happened to Emily When She was Younger” is the most promising segment but also the most disappointing, for reasons I can’t describe without revealing the ending.  It consists entirely of recorded Skype conversations between a couple who are living apart while the boyfriend attends medical school.  His girlfriend, Emily, keeps hearing strange sounds in her apartment and begins to believe that it’s haunted.  When she hears the sounds at night, she calls her boyfriend, so he can observe via Skype as she investigates.  In one of the most terrifying moments of “V/H/S,” he can only watch in horror as Emily begins to discover what is going on.  Another innovative way of capturing the footage is a nanny-cam imbedded in the mask of a bear costume worn by a character in the last segment, “10/31/98.”  He and his friends enter a house thinking they are going to a Halloween party, but they actually stumble upon what appears to be a ritual sacrifice.  They rescue the victim with surprising results.

The other segments rely on characters with handheld video cameras to record the action.  “Second Honeymoon” is a road trip story in which we quickly learn that someone else is following the couple and attempting to enter their hotel rooms at night.  It features some of the creepiest moments of “V/H/S.”  As its title suggests, “Tuesday the 17^th” is a killer-in-the-woods style slasher, but its villain is very different from Jason Voorhees.

 

My only complaint is with the framing story that tries unsuccessfully to make the five segments fit into a larger narrative.  But the problem with this frame isn’t so much that it fails to unify the narrative—each segment works perfectly well on its own—as it’s just a bad segment.  It, too, relies on found footage, but it lacks the authenticity of the others and feels contrived.  A group of hooligans who like to film themselves committing crimes is hired to break into a guy’s house to steal a video tape.  He turns out to have a large video collection, which includes the five segments of found footage that “V/H/S” comprises.  The character with the camera is the one who finds the segments and seems to be filming them while he watches.  The result is found-footage overkill.  I wish “V/H/S” had either followed the example of “Cannibal Holocaust” or left out the frame altogether.

But aside from this one flaw, I really enjoyed “V/H/S,” and it’s not hard to imagine it becoming a new horror franchise.