Jungle and cannibal exploitation movies are associated with extreme gore, shockingly explicit ritual killings and copious amounts of bloodshed. During their captivity in a cage, fear and desperation takes the upper hand while some of the group members – most notably Alejandro – show their true cowardly and repulsive nature. Many of the group members die instantly in the crash or in freaky accidents, but the fate of the survivors is even worse as they are promptly surrounded by a tribe of red-colored cannibals. After a successful, but for Justine very traumatizing confrontation with the deconstruction workers and their bulldozers, the group's ramshackle old plane crashes down in the jungle. The beautiful and ambitious freshman student Justine joins an environmentalist activist group led by the charismatic Alejandro, as they are about to travel to Peru in order to protest against the deforestation of the Amazonian rain forest. In case "The Green Inferno" triggered your appetite – so to speak – make sure that you track down all these controversial but hugely fascinating films. The most infamous and influential one is, of course, Ruggero Deodato's "Cannibal Holocaust", but there are several more beauties out there and Eli Roth refers to all of them here, like "Deep River Savages", "Cannibal Ferox", "Mountain of the Cannibal God", "Jungle Holocaust" and "Cannibal Apocalypse". This very secluded horror niche contains relatively few titles, but each and every single one is a notorious and bona fide cult classic. "The Green Inferno" is a giant homage – love letter, even – to the temporarily popular trend of Italian cannibal movies from the late 70s & early 80s. But there's one thing you really can't deny and that is that Eli Roth is an avid and obsessive lover of the genre and that clearly shows in every film he delivers.
It took me two viewings before I could remotely appreciate "Cabin Fever" and both "Hostel" movies are quite heavily flawed as well. It's not because Quentin Tarantino proclaims that Roth is the future of the horror genre, simply based on having seen "Cabin Fever" that the rest of us genre fanatics obediently have to agree. The films of Eli Roth are an acquired taste, or at least for me personally they were.