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.