It’s complicated between me and Eli Roth. On the one hand, Cabin Fever was one of my “watch the world burn” comfort movies for something like 15 years. On the other hand, I have hated just about everything else he’s done. On the third hand, his first appearance as Donnie the Bear Jew in Inglourious Basterds is one of the most thrilling character introductions in any Tarantino movie.1 On the fourth hand, Roth almost immediately ruins the intimidating swagger effect by indulging in corny trash talk.

That’s kind of the complication in a nutshell, honestly. Anything I like about Eli Roth gets overwhelmed by him being too Eli Roth about it. It goes deeper than stylistic or aesthetic preferences, though I don’t care for torture porn as a genre; we are just fundamentally incompatible. That incompatibility is at the heart of why it took me three tries to get through The Green Inferno (2013), one of his more controversial schlockfests (which is saying a LOT; he also directed Hostel 2).

The first thing you need to know is that Roth intended The Green Inferno as his love letter to Italian cannibal films like Cannibal Holocaust; and as his poison pen letter to “slacktivists.” In the early 2010s, slacktivists—mostly young leftists whose activism only extended to virtue signaling online—were a common enemy for edgelords, party leaders, talking heads, and actual activists. Per their reputation, they were too easily distracted by the next international crisis to be helpful, and too high on their own self-righteousness to care. An easy target, and a welcome one. The only issue is, as usual, Roth’s execution.

The Green Inferno concerns Justine (Lorenza Izzo), a New York college freshman who joins a highly visible campus activist group: partly because learning about female genital mutilation has radicalized her, and partly because she has a crush on the allegedly charismatic group leader, Alejandro (Ariel Levy). The group has just ended a hunger strike on behalf of the campus janitors, which resolved in the janitors getting health insurance! Their next plan is to go to Peru to stop a petrochemical company from bulldozing an indigenous tribe’s land. So, right off the bat: these are not slacktivists! These kids are doing actual activism! They are annoyingly earnest and self-congratulatory about it, but they have earned the right to congratulate themselves! They are doing something real, and they are succeeding at their goals.

However, accuracy never stopped an Eli Roth show. And he has a general “that’s what you get for caring” energy that he needs to unleash.

Once the activists make it to the deforestation site, he starts unleashing on them pretty much immediately. Alejandro reveals that he wanted Justine’s participation so he could leverage her as the white suburban American girl whose father works at the U.N., unapologetically putting her in more danger than the others. Then, their prop plane malfunctions and crashes, landing the group deep in the indigenous territory they just defended. And you remember what I said about this movie being a loving homage to Cannibal Holocaust, right?

This is really a nose-to-tail Eli Roth production. He co-wrote the movie with his frequent collaborator Guillermo Amoedo, but he also gets a ‘story by’ credit. He’s the one who loves Cannibal Holocaust and hates activists. He’s the one who decided that his “no no no, it’s a satire of American xenophobia!” cover from the Hostel movies would work here, too. He’s also the one who was in love with his star,2 a fact that comes across quite sweetly in how angelically the camera shoots her.

Of course, once the cannibalistic tribe captures Izzo’s Justine, the juxtaposition of her angelic framing and their demonic otherness makes everything feel really gross. And not a sAtIRe of gross. Just straightforwardly racist and gross.

I’m not cutting Roth any slack on this one, I fear. Because every interview he gave about this movie offends me to my core, even though he and his defenders would scoff and delight in equal measure at my being offended. Here’s my least favourite snippet of his, from this interview:

So. You mean to tell me that you explained the concept of moving pictures to a group of people whose language you don’t speak, then showed them something that is just—just shy of a snuff film and they thought it was so funny that they wanted to then participate in one themselves? Do you know what this means? That that’s how dumb you think everyone is, Eli. That anyone would believe a syllable of this tale. This is so clearly an edgelord “bro could you imagine?” joke3 that’s barely fit for r/thathappened, and you decided to spin it into a defense of your demeaning xenophobic bullshit because you are xenophobic and full of shit!

The cast, for the most part4. Whatever Roth’s intentions, most of the activists really sell me on their sincerity, terror, and solidarity. As the horrors persist, the youths keep trying to keep each other safe, from both their tormentors and their mounting despair. It doesn’t work out for them, but I believe in them nonetheless.

I also really respect the fuck out of vegan Amy’s decision. If I were an anxious queer vegan in this scenario and I just realized that I had eaten my girlfriend’s flesh in a soup, I would do exactly what my girl does here.

Much as I want to, I can’t lay all the blame at Eli Roth’s feet. I mentioned earlier that so-called slacktivists were an easy punching bag for people across the spectrum. The people who should have been our collective punching bags were the edgelords. The hateful little guttersnipes who barely hid their bigotry behind a fig leaf of “trolling.” Who were just joking about being Nazis, and who would whip each other into a fury over women talking about video game tropes. The right thing to do back then would have been to shame and de-platform these people wherever possible. Instead, we gave them leeway, and then podcasts, and then Fortune 500 companies, and then the White House. Twice. And we wrote off anyone who called these people offensive as hysterical.

Feast your eyes, for instance, on the conclusion of David Edelstein’s New York Magazine review of this movie:

This culture of “not taking the bait” to prove how in on the joke and reasonable we all are hath wrought some extremely unreasonable times, hasn’t it?

I couldn’t DNF two movies in a row, for one thing. Also, Sammy from Too Scary; Didn’t Watch did an excellent recap of it, and she made me believe that if she could do it, I could too.

If you’re a degenerate gorehound like me, then yes. Because the gore effects are pretty outstanding—a baseline requirement for an Eli Roth picture. Even before we get to the cannibalism, there’s a gnarly plane crash that takes out half the characters with panache. And my favourite cannibalism scene (degenerate thing to say) does manage to stick the “gross and funny” landing pretty well.

Do I regret watching a movie where Alejandro starts jerking off in the cage with everyone in order to “relieve stress,” and then continues jerking off when he gets punched in the face, so that I had to read the caption “[faint smacking continues]”? You tell me.

On the next Terrible Tuesday: Janelle Monae’s miserable time-traveling misadventure.

Thank you so much for reading! If you enjoyed this essay, please take a second to feel Al Gore’s rhythm by liking and sharing it.