The Green Inferno

Director: Eli Roth (2013)

Starring: Lorenza Izzo, Ariel Levy, Aaron Burns

Find it: IMDB

Enthusiastic horror frat boy Eli Roth returns to directing with The Green Inferno, his modern take on the jungle cannibal movie. I love Cabin Fever, mildly despise Hostel and quite like its sequel, so to say that I'm ambivalent towards Roth's work is accurate. There's no denying that his heart is in the right place, but that enthusiasm doesn't always translate to good horror. Still, I was pumped for The Green Inferno - the jungle cannibal subgenre is a personal favourite, and I was eager to see what Roth could do with it.

The answer, predictably, is to fill it with poo, weed and dick jokes. It takes less than ten minutes for one of the characters to describe something as 'gay' and the writing doesn't improve from there. The story sees naive college student Justine (Izzo) fall in with the wrong (or right, depending on your view) crowd - a collective of activists set on saving the Amazon rainforest. Hopping on a dodgy aeroplane, the kids travel to a particularly remote area of the Amazon where they hope to fuck up the corporate destruction they find there. Suffice to say, things do not go to plan.

Not unless the plan is to end up tied to a stick, dressed like some sort of sixties Star Trek extra.

A far cry from the gloomy torture basements and drippy alleyways of Hostel and its sequel, The Green Inferno looks incredible. Lush, verdant and beautiful, the jungle setting makes this one of the most visually compelling horror films I've seen in years. As a visual storyteller, Roth is King - he hasn't made a bad film yet, in that respect. The scene in which our young heroes are led into the cannibal village to their doom is up there with Hostel's big reveal - where Paxton is dragged, kicking and screaming into the dungeons - and, at that moment, I believed that The Green Inferno would turn out alright.

Sadly, 'alright' is as far as it goes. For everything it gets right - and there's a lot - there's just as much it gets very wrong. The Green Inferno is utterly fantastic as long as no-one is speaking at the time. Lorenza Izzo, Aaron Burns and Daryl Sabara (looking like a curly Jay from The Inbetweeners) do well as the most likeable ones in the group, but everyone else is short-thrifted by immature humour and curious lack of tension. The film lost me at its shitting-in-a-cage scene, and didn't do much to regain my interest from there.

The live-action version of The Simpsons left a lot to be desired.

Slightly racist in spite of its best intentions (there's an attempt at giving the cannibals justification, but only barely) and stuck with the stupidest ending this side of Hostel 2, this is ultimately a wasted opportunity. It possesses one truly great gore sequence and a lovely lead in Izzo, but fails to effectively utilise those elements. That's a shame, since The Green Inferno has room to be a modern classic.

Still, I hope that the film gets its release soon. Good or bad, it's a film that deserves to be seen - if only for its juicy visuals - and I'm eager to revisit it, without expectation. The Green Inferno isn't worth getting hot under the collar about, but it's an interesting oddity, all the same.

Cannibal

Director: Benjamin Vire (2010)

Starring: Nicolas Gob, Helena Coppejans, Jean Collard

Find it: IMDB

Pretentious, smug, annoying, unhelpful shit that can't decide whether to be talky, silent, black & white or colour. I get to sound like an idiot now for not enjoying Cannibal, but excuse me for wanting to actually see what is going on in my movies. Some may find it cute when you decide not to subtitle bits of the dialogue, but either subtitle all of it or none of it.

Cannibal is like an avant-garde version of The Woman crossed with Jet Li vehicle Unleashed. I thought both of those movies were enjoyable. I think Cannibal is only very intermittently enjoyable. That enjoyable part of the movie lasts roughly ten minutes. The rest is either incomprehensible or silly or horrible. Some gypsies have a pet cannibal woman called Bianca (Coppejeans) to whom they feed the losers of their cage fighting matches. One day they manage to lose Bianca in the woods, where she is found by agoraphobic ex-gangster golf fan Max (Gob). Max carries her home and adopts the little dear. Instead of attempting to civilise her, he cleans up after her murders and gradually begins to fall in love with the wee scamp. And then the gypsy gangsters turn up and kidnap her back. Poor Max decides to hunt down the gangsters and reclaim his love. Via the plot of Man On Fire and what I can only describe as The Sopranos' opening credits.

It's very clever that the film goes all black & white as soon as Max loses his darling Bianca. It's even quite charming when our hero kills a van full of gangsters and starts shouting things like "damn those black guys!" Unless, that is, you don't like film school cinematography and racism for the sake of racism. Damn those Belgian guys. There's also gangster rap on the soundtrack, and gangster rap is always inexcusable unless your name is Attack The Block.

Furthermore, I cannot take seriously any character called Bianca, let alone one that is supposed to be at once sexy and scary. People called Bianca are generally not hot, sexy cannibals. People called Bianca generally look like this:

Not scary or sexy. No offense to anyone called Bianca. But I found it incredibly distracting anytime anyone said "where's Bianca?" or "hello Bianca", because I kept thinking of the horrible ginger face above. No offense to anyone with a horrible ginger face. Whilst there's some good gore and some good action and a funny scene in which a man hangs a spoon off his nose, the rest is all too cloying and pretentious.

Cannibal is a stupid film that spends too much time pretending to be clever and not enough time actually being clever.

Vinyan

Director: Fabrice Du Welz (2008)

Starring: Emmanuelle Beart, Rufus Sewell

Find it: IMDB, Amazon

Classy cannibal horror for the broadsheet crowd. By which I mean, it's not properly horror and it's not strictly about cannibals. But it is kinda scary and someone does get their gut chomped. My point being that you can pick up a copy of Vinyan alongside your Guardian newspaper and nobody will bat an eyelid.

It stars Rufus Sewell and Emmanuelle Beart, who are always quite popular amongst the Guardian readers. Set in post-tsunami Thailand, it has them playing a married couple searching for their missing child. Lost, presumed dead in the aftermath of the tsunami, he's apparently sighted in Burma. Mummy and Daddy mount an ill-advised and very expensive search, which takes them deep into the dangerous jungle. Careful, thar be cannibals. Sort of.

It's nice to see a jungle cannibal movie that follows a different school of thought from the usual "they're savages... no wait, we're the savages" stuff, which had already been done to death by the mid 1980s. Vinyan takes a more personal approach. The parents have their own issues, see - and what they find in the jungle really accentuates that, slowly turning Mom and Pop against each other. There's tension from the start, but nothing strains a marriage like a jungle full of cannibals.

It's a bit of a slow burner in that the emphasis is firmly on Ma and Pa than everything else. And cannibals aren't the only threat - they're led deeper and deeper into the jungle by ominous seeming gangsters that we - and they - trust less and less. By the time that things take a turn for the worse(r), we're in little doubt that Mother and Father are utterly fucked. At this point, the movie has accumulated a deeply unsettling vibe. There's hardly any gore or violence at all, but rather a nightmarish streak of dread that says something like no, this can't end well.

I thoroughly recommend Vinyan alongside the less subtle cannibal classics. It's a sad, bleak but rewarding bit of jungle grue. All that and not a handheld video camera in sight.

Welcome To The Jungle

Director: Jonathan Hensleigh (2007)

Starring: Sandy Gardiner, Callard Harris, Nick Richey, Veronica Sywak

Find it: IMDB, Amazon

Not to be confused with that Seann William Scott movie of occasionally the same name, Welcome To The Jungle sees two young couples head into the jungles of New Guinea for much bickering and terror. Terror at the hands of cannibals. Which is good. There's not been a decent cannibal horror movie in years.

Welcome To The Jungle sends its protagonists deep into the jungle in search of missing US Governor's son Michael Rockefeller, hoping they can find the feller and claim any reward money going. Why a bunch of idiot kids think they can succeed where a massive government manhunt failed is beyond me, but hey - the movie needs its plot. All I'm sayin' is that they should have visited Wikipedia first: Rockefeller was probably eaten by a crocodile. When a man's disappearance is explained by several kinds of horrible death, you might be best off not following in his footsteps. Welcome To The Jungle has our foolish kids fall foul of the nastiest of those possibilities. Which is fine, because I hate those foolish kids.

Like most other jungle cannibal movies, Welcome To The Jungle is filmed on cameras held by the characters. This, however, is more like Blair Witch than Cannibal Holocaust, since none of them record anything remotely interesting until about twenty minutes before the end. They bicker and cry and shout and misbehave something terrible. It's a relief when the cannibals turn up. Cannibals are always relatively quiet and well behaved, if you ignore the eating.

I understand why it's necessary to make characters in a cannibal movie act like assholes. You want to go to the jungle and have your characters get eaten, right? But you can't just claim that these indigenous people are all merciless cannibals - because that would be xenophobic and maybe a little racist. And since you're not HP Lovecraft, you gotta give the cannibals reason to be cannibals. And you have to have someone say something like "no man, we're the real savages here" (thankfully nobody says that in this movie) and make out that we're the assholes; have the eaten deserve their fates. Which is cool. I'm in no mood to watch racist cannibal movies. But it's tiresome spending a whole movie watching whiny bastards squeal and punch their way through an undeserving jungle that they have no business travelling through in the first place.

In Welcome To The Jungle, the tribe don't have as much motive as they do in other cannibal movies. The douchebag character who looks a bit like Chris Evans steals a skull, but I'm not convinced that its the reason he gets eaten. I think he just gets eaten because he's white and really noisy all the time. So it's probably a little more xenophobic in that respect, but at least we don't have to watch the kids raping shit or bullying the natives into eating them. They're edible trespassers so they got eaten. Simple as that. It's more simplistic, banal reasoning than you might get from a Deodato, but it has its merits.

Unfortunately, if you have seen a Deodato or a Lenzi, then there's no point in watching Welcome To The Jungle. It's less gory, less violent, less interesting, less good and not even as pretty. When you've seen the genre as explicit as it gets, there's little point in watching a watered down imitation. It's good for those building up to watch the greats - or who have never seen a jungle cannibal movie before - but dull and predictable to everyone else. The found footage gimmick doesn't really work and much of the endgame's violence is shrouded in pitch blackness. The ending is predictable.

Like most cannibal movies, it stays with the viewer for a while after watching. There's a primal fear that makes it such a worthy concept. Welcome To The Jungle is perhaps more watchable than the 'classics', but it's more of a starter than a main course. The cheese sandwich of cannibal movies, it's tasty, but will leave you hungry for something more filling.

Motel Hell

Director: Kevin Connor (1980)

Starring: Rory Calhoun, Paul Linke, Nancy Parsons, Nina Axelrod

Find it: IMDB, Amazon

Totally true fact: I will watch any horror movie in which an aggressor wears a pig's head or carries a chainsaw. This may lead to me watching a lot of crappy movies (ahem, hello Saw franchise) but there can occasionally be gold in them thar hills. Case in point, Motel Hell. It combines my inexplicable fetish for chainsaws and people wearing bits of pig on their heads to make a demented, oddly watchable backwoods horror movie that even manages to rise above being the Texas Chain Saw Massacre rip-off that it so obviously is.

Farmer Vincent (Calhoun) and sister Ida (Parsons) live on a farm next to the eponymous Motel Hell(o), which they also own and run. But Vincent's cheerful disposition and smiley demeanour do not belie his true nature. For in his spare time, he enjoys killing people and harvesting their bodies to create his special 'smoked meats' which he then sells to the motel's guests. As a byproduct of Vincent's murderous, cannibalistic activities, into Motel Hell(o) runs Terry (Axelrod), unaware that Vincent has recently harvested her poor boyfriend for dinner. Terry soon begins to fall for Vincent, making the man's sister strangely jealous. Will Terry discover Vincent's dark secrets? Will she even care?

Motel Hell is a very silly movie, often to its own detriment. It brings to mind a more watchable version of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre: Next Generation. It could do with taking itself a little more seriously at times, but some of the humour does bring a smile to the face. I particularly enjoyed seeing Vincent's victims planted like vegetables, and Rory Calhoun does a great job playing the villain. Could have done without the dense cop character though, and the romantic aspect is balls-out stupid. But Motel Hell makes up for some of its silliness with a fun chainsaw related showdown at the end and just enough gore to paint over the cracks. Plus: a man wearing a pig mask carrying a chainsaw. Nuff said.

2001 Maniacs: Field of Screams

Director: Tim Sullivan (2010)

Starring: Bill Moseley, Lin Shaye, Christa Campbell

Find it online: IMDB, Amazon UK, Amazon US

Disclaimer: I didn't watch this movie all the way through. But there is actually nothing that could possibly ever have happened in the last twenty minutes to earn this shitty movie even one Scream Queen. Field Of Screams is literally unwatchable. It makes the previous Maniacs movies look Oscarworthy and Herschell Gordon Lewis like Dario Argento. 2001 Maniacs: Field Of Screams is maybe the worst movie of 2010 so far and definitely the worst STD sequel to anything half-good since Wrong Turn 3. This isn't hyperbole or the whinings of a man incapable of appreciating cheesy splatter (I loved the original 2001 Maniacs): Field Of Screams is atrocious in every single way. It's irredeemable toss without any of the spirit, creativity, fun or Robert Englund that its predecessor possesses. I hate this movie and I hate myself for watching it.

After supplies run dry back home, the 2001 Maniacs take to the road in search of fresh meat. In a school bus. Yes, a supposed 2001 maniacs travel around in an apparently TARDIS sized school bus. I'm not sure if there are even 20 maniacs in this movie, let alone 2001. They're almost outnumbered by their Northern prey. Their victims are a gaggle of Hollywood TV types, creating a TV show that's apparently supposed to be spoofing the Paris & Nicole thing. Hilarious characterisation gets us a Jewish money-grabbing director with stereotypical sideburn things, a Mexican chappy called Jesus, some blonde bimbos and black people who constantly refer to their own skin colour. Field Of Screams mistakes edginess for racism and has its characters speak in a series of racial slurs and epithets. Thankfully, I was too busy being offended by its all-out shittiness than its racism. No-one will really be offended by this movie because no-one of any consequence or intelligence will get much further than the horrible title sequence.

I feel bad for my poor brain cells but even worse for Bill Moseley and Lin Shaye, who are far too good for the likes of this crap. Moseley gives it his all, but there's only so far talent and charisma will get you when nobody else has any. I'm genuinely embarrassed for poor Shaye, forced into a series of ridiculous costumes and scenarios.

Even when one considers its low-budget splatterpunk aspirations, Field Of Screams is a failure. It's terrible, both technically and morally. I've seen better horror, better acting and better scripting on Youtube. Every single thing about it is shit. The South's Gonna Rise Again? I fucking hope not.

Cannibal Holocaust

Director: Ruggero Deodato (1980)

Starring: Robert Kerman, Francesca Ciardi, Perry Pirkanen

Find it online: IMDB, Amazon UK, Amazon US

Say what you will about the movie itself, but Cannibal Holocaust has one of the best opening tunes I've ever heard. It's hard to believe that a piece of music so beautiful could accompany a movie so infamously horrible. For your ears' delectation, that opening piece of snyth is reproduced in the youtube viddy below. And worry not gentle readers, there's no violence or animal abuse depicted within should that sort of thing worry you.

Lovely, isn't it? Thereafter, Cannibal Holocaust becomes as gruesome as you'd heard it was. The movie tells of four documentarians who travel deep into the Amazon rainforest to film indigenous tribes. They don't return. Later, anthropologist Monroe (Kerman) follows in their footsteps, hoping to find them. What he does find is the missing filmakers' documentary footage. It doesn't make for happy viewing.

And neither does Cannibal Holocaust as a whole. It's an unflinchingly cruel movie, almost as much so as you heard it was. There's something to offend everyone: cruelty to animals, extreme gore and cannibalism, rape, a bit with a rock and a vagina, and a lot of lurid leering at the various atrocities on show. Indeed, it's not so much the atrocities listed above that make Cannibal Holocaust such difficult viewing but rather the leering ways in which they are viewed. It's like a really nasty Bruce Parry adventure. Or that episode of South Park where Cartman goes to the jungle and hits things with a stick. Actually, the South Park comparison is pretty apt even if I do say so myself. Animal lovers will be well advised to find a copy of the movie that bypasses the gory animal bits. The bit with the turtle is one of the most stomach-churning things I've seen in a very long time. It's things such as this which make Cannibal Holocaust a hard movie to defend. It's a piece designed to be an experience; not entertainment.

That said, there is a really sweet scene in which Monroe bathes naked with the female tribe members. It quickly gives way to some typical nastiness, but it's a nice touch and one that goes largely unmentioned in other descriptions of the movie. It's easily hidden amongst the more grotesque stuff. But there are a few of these surprisingly tender moments dotted here and there, usually accompanied by Riz Ortaloni's beautifully haunting score. It's almost a waste really. I don't think the movie deserves Ortaloni's musical interludes, and I doubt I'd appreciate it even half as much without it.

I didn't expect to like Cannibal Holocaust - and I don't really - but it's an undeniably powerful movie, nowhere near as unwatchable or shit as I'd expected it to be. Perhaps it helps that this is the first real Italian Cannibal movie I've ever watched (no, Zombie Holocaust, you don't even nearly count) and was therefore starting at the top. Or bottom, depending on how you view its artistic merit.

It indicates the nature of the beast that I feel I need to justify the following rating. Heck, I feel like I'm gonna be put on some sort of register simply having watched it. I give Cannibal Holocaust 4/5 of my screamy Scream Queens because it's well-made in its own way, and undeniably a large part of horror history. I didn't enjoy watching it, and I certainly don't like it, but that shouldn't stop one from admiring it for the things it does well. It defies description or even reviewing. Listen to the script, and most of it stands as a pretty good description of the movie itself: "It's unbelievable. It's horrible. I can't understand the reason for such cruelty."

Quite.

Zombie Holocaust

Director: Marino Girolami (1980)

Starring: Ian McCulloch, Alexandra Della Colli

Find it online: IMDB, Amazon UK, Amazon US

'Zombie Holocaust’. Really? No exaggeration, not one single person gets killed by zombies in Marino Girolami’s so called Zombie Holocaust. An obvious cash-in on more successful (and good) titles, it recalls such cheese-fest nasties as Burial Ground and Zombie Flesh Eaters. And, in grand Italian tradition, the flick has a bunch of titles; none of them particularly pertinent. Otherwise known as Zombie 3 (no relation, obviously) and Doctor Butcher, MD (my favourite), Zombie Holocaust features hardly any zombies and no holocaust.

Ian McCulloch stars as Dr. Peter Chandler, a doctor of something who leads an ill-advised expedition to South Asia in search of cannibals. For some reason, said cannibals are travelling to New York hospitals and munching on the patients found therein. McCulloch, as fans of shit will already know, is the best thing about the movie. He looks a bit like Roger Moore and has his own Wikipedia page. If Moore-era James Bond had quit spying and become an explorer, he’d be Peter Chandler. But anyway, how or why his cannibals travel to New York is never really explained – but that’s the least of your troubles here.

Zombie Holocaust is an obvious cash-in on the success of such classics as Zombie Flesh Eaters (which also starred Ian McCulloch as a doctor named Peter) and the increasingly popular cannibal movies of the time. Because Zombies + Cannibals = CASH. In retrospect, they should probably have called it Zombies vs Cannibals, or at least something a little bit more descriptive of their actual product. Nibbling Zombies, perhaps. Or The Zombies that Didn’t Eat Anything.

But back to the plot. Alexandra Delli Colli stars as Lori Ridgeway, who has a degree in anthropology and is therefore of utmost importance to the team. She also grew up near the Cannibal Island, although this is never touched on again. She and Peter are joined in turn by a journalist, some cannon-fodder and a shifty tour guide named Molotto.

First to die are the ethnic bag-carriers, who wander off into the jungle and immediately get themselves eaten. It’d probably be scary if it didn’t look so horribly fake. There’s a scene where one character has his eyes poked out. As eye-gougings go, it’s probably the worst I’ve ever seen, since the blood is far too red and the victim’s head looks like a papier mache construct. Lucio Fulci this ain’t.

Just as Peter and Lori are about to die, the zombies appear and scare away the cannibals, who run off hysterically and hide in the undergrowth. Why they’d be so scared is unclear, since the zombies look shit and are incapable of killing anything. The cannibals capture a crew of armed, prepared Westerners… and then flee at the sight of crappy, shambling corpses? I don’t buy it. And neither do our heroes. In lieu of escaping, Peter and Lori decide to investigate further, uncovering the half-cocked scheme of Mad Scientist Dr. Obrero (or Dr. Butcher, if you have the US version) as they go. Aside from looking and sounding like Harvey Keitel, Doc Butcher plans to transplant Peter’s brain into a dead, decomposed body. This would explain the zombies, but it’s also unspeakably stupid. But not as stupid as what comes next:

Lori, adopted as a goddess by the locals, leads a cannibal army against Doc Butcher, and frees Peter in the process. The ending, by the way, is a bunch of recycled footage they used in Zombie Flesh Eaters, because it obviously been too much hassle to shoot some new stuff.

The only reason to watch this movie is for its incredibly high Cheese Factor. And even then, only if you’ve watched everything else. It’s woefully lacking in too many departments. The gore is too fake to convince, the acting is terrible (yes, even you, McCulloch) and the story is utterly slapdash.

As you’d expect with such a classic bit of Cheese, the below Scream Queens are once again screaming ironically:

3/5 screaming Scream Queens!!!