“The location that we found is truly spectacular. It’s so far up the Amazon, no one has ever shot there. The last person anywhere near there was Werner Herzog for Aguirre, the Wrath of God,” Eli Roth said when it comes to his latest film, The Green Inferno. “We said, ‘Can we shoot here?’ and talked to them, and our producers said ‘We have to explain to them what a movie is. They’ve never seen a television. So we brought a generator and set up a television. I thought they were going to show them E.T. or The Wizard of Oz, but they showed them Cannibal Holocaust to see how much they could handle. The villagers thought it was the funniest thing they’d ever seen.”
With that quote setting the stage, we now have the first teaser trailer for the cannibal horror film, which first directorial effort since 2007’s Hostel sequel. We saw the film at its Toronto premiere last fall, saying in our review, “He seems sure of the (obviously violent) human behaviors he wants to document, yet not of the striking images necessary to compellingly do so, as is imminently apparent by The Green Inferno’s television-esque cinematography.” This first teaser spools up some frightening imagery, and one can see it below ahead of a fall release.
Idealistic Justine (Lorenza Izzo) joins a group of campus radicals on a mission to disrupt the illegal clear-cutting of a Peruvian jungle, which is endangering the tranquil lives of an isolated Amazonian tribe. Armed with good intentions and the power of their cellphone cameras, the group flies to Peru and seemingly succeeds in their mission. But the activists’ celebration quickly turns to tragedy when their plane crashes in the jungle — and they find themselves on the dinner menu of the very people they were trying to protect.
The Green Inferno opens on September 5th.