Directed by: Rutgers Deodato
Written by: Gianfranco Clerici
Starring: Robert Karman, Francesca Ciardi, Perry Pirkanen
1 hour, 36 minutes
The credits roll over peaceful and beautiful jungle scenery, all shot from a helicopter; happy, light music plays. Things go downhill quickly. A reporter explains about four filmakers who went to the “Green inferno,” an Amazon jungle outpost, and never returned. Much of the rest is shown as found-footage and documentary footage as we try to learn what happened to the foursome.
Professor Harold Monroe arrives on a plane, planning an expedition to rescue the missing four filmmakers. It’s not long before they find the first skeleton, and soon after, we find out that the rescue party is stuck between two warring tribes of cannibals.
Eventually, the missing filmakers are tracked down, and their footage is reviewed by the professor. This story is like two films in one: the professor exploring and researching what happened to the first team, and the “found footage” of the first team. The professors story is a little violent and has a little gore, but doesn’t seem too over the top. The found footage… Well, this is where things start getting over the top, and a lot of it is completely illogical and pointless.
There’s a lot of real jungle shots and jungle scenery here, and lot of it is quite impressive. Overall, the attention to detail and the realism of everything is one of the most distinctive things about the film. Actually, the most “disturbing” thing about this film is that a lot of things you see in the film are real. All the animal deaths, for example, were real (the turtle is particularly graphic). The native forced to eat monkey brains was real. Several of the executions were of actual executions. Not knowing what was and wasn’t real is what made this movie special.
I more or less enjoyed the first half of the film, until the professor came back to civilization and started watching the found movies. The behavior of the four “top-notch professional filmmakers” was just unexplained and ridiculous.
One of the movie executives in the film says, “The more you rape their senses, the happier they are,” and the professor responds, “would you want people to make money off of your misery?” Then the two literally debate the merits of exploitation films within the film itself.
This is one of the earliest “found footage” movies that I know of, although it’s not always clear who is doing the camerawork. If you like gore and maybe a little too much realism, you’ll get a kick out of this. If you’re looking for great acting, snappy dialog, and a logical plot, go somewhere else.
