It was recently posted on this prestigious website that Eli Roth was finally going to get behind the camera again and make a movie called The Green Inferno.
Being a connoisseur of Italian horror/exploitation films, I’m no stranger to the cannibal film sub-genre*. It started with Umberto Lenzi’s The Man From Deep River, then escalated when Ruggero Deodato got his grubby hands involved and we got the one/two punch of Jungle Holocaust and the infamous Cannibal Holocaust**. If you’re a horror fan, there’s a high chance you’ve at least heard of this notorious film. Quite possibly the first found footage film, it’s a mix of first person camera and actual third person, the film is about a Professor named Monroe who travels to the Amazon in search of a film crew that went missing there. He finds the footage they shot, and when he returns to New York (it’s an Italian film, and all Italian films use New York), he watches the footage they shot, and he discovers that they weren’t exactly all that innocent and undeserving of their fates.
The jungle that Professor Monroe travels into is called The Green Inferno. See where this is going? Eli Roth is making a cannibal film.
At first thought to be a sequel to Cannibal Holocaust*** (Deodato himself has announced that he was intending on making a sequel, and he is buddies with Roth, even having a cameo in Hostel: Part II), it has now been revealed that the film is not a sequel, but it’s plot is pretty damn close to Deodato’s film.
Here’s the brief synopsis:
The Green Inferno follows an idealistic student and a group of naive do-gooders who are captured by cannibalistic Indios after their plane crash lands in the Peruvian jungle.
This thing is looking to be a modern day take on the cannibal genre, and I think we’d all like to forget about Jonathan Hensleigh’s Welcome To The Jungle (I still haven’t seen it.), so this should probably be another top flight horror film throwback, and probably won’t bring back the cannibal film sub-genre, but will be a nice addition to it.
*Lenzi did several other cannibal films, Eaten Alive, probably the second tamest of the cannibal films that he did, and more of an adventure film that centers on a girl who hires a Vietnam vet (played by Professor Monroe himself, Robert Kerman) to get her sister back from a Jim Jones-esque mad man (played by Italian exploitation film stalwart Ivan Rassimov), and Cannibal Ferox, better known as Make Them Die Slowly. This one starred cool Italian genre stalwart, Giovanni Lomardo Radice, and Lorraine De Selle. Both of which had also starred in The House On The Edge Of The Park (directed by Deodato, and even though it’s a depraved film, it’s got a great soundtrack, and David Hess never disappoints.) There was even a friggin’ EMANUELLE cannibal film called Emanuelle And The Last Cannibals starring the lovely Laura Gemser.
**One thing that stands out in the film (aside from the detestable animal killings) is a piece of actual Ugandan execution footage (this same footage is on display in the Criterion Collection dvd General Idi Amin Dada: A Self Portrait).
***There actually was a pseudo sequel that Deodato did called Cut And Run that stars Michael Berryman and Richard Lynch!
source: bloody-disgusting