While he has gained some attention for his collaborations with Quentin Tarantino, Eli Roth is still far from being a household name. Roth’s films tend to be fairly extreme.
He was responsible for “Cabin Fever”, a film about teens falling victim to a flesh-eating virus. He also directed “Hostel”, which focuses on the torture of a group of backpackers in Slovakia. More recently, Roth directed “Knock Knock”, where a man is seduced and tortured by two young women. Basically, the man seems to enjoy doing gross torture stuff but he went the extra mile with a movie called “The Green Inferno”.
The movie follows a group of student activists that travel to the Amazon to save the rainforest but end up coming into contact with a hostile group of natives that torture them. It may sound pretty similar to the other Roth movies but this one is different because Roth actually went to the jungle and filmed some real natives.
The Peruvian jungle natives had supposedly never been filmed or photographed by Westerners before. As they lived in the jungle with no television, they had no idea what a movie was so Roth introduced the tribe to cinema by showing them a gory exploitation picture from Italy, “Cannibal Holocaust”. The tribespeople apparently loved it and got onboard with the project. It seems awfully risky asking people that have no clue what a film is to only pretend to be torturing and murdering people. Even the notoriously crazy Mel Gibson used actors and actresses for “Apocalypto”.
During the making of the movie, Christian missionaries showed up on boats and were not aware that a film was being shot. They became quite alarmed when they saw all sorts of gory props such as skeletons and dead bodies impaled on stakes. This means that in making a film about some people getting scared by a jungle tribe, he actually managed to scare some people with a jungle tribe.
