Tag: Survival

I have not seen a lot of actual horror films made by Eli Roth. He is supposed to be a big name, but when I looked at his directed list I had seen…well, zero. I thought he had directed Aftershock, but I was wrong about that.

But I am sure I will watch Knock Knock at some point! That is some sort of Thriller and it is on VOD exactly when it was supposed to be. Apparently The Green Inferno was not as lucky. Made in 2013, it was supposed to come out in 2014, but shit hit the fan, and it got delayed over a year. Which is why Eli Roth even has two movies coming out only roughly a month apart.

Speaking of intro small talk, the film was clearly inspired by Cannibal Holocaust. That is a film from the 1980’s which introduced found footage before it was even a thing. It was very gruesome, realistic, and basically the same plot of some white people heading to the rain forest to get eaten. In fact, people insisted at the time that it must have been a snuff film! The title itself was the name of the movie that was being made in Cannibal Holocaust.

“Ooooh hair, my favorite.”

Being an activist in college is one of the easiest things to do with your free time. Once you walk through a quad or a pit or a hallway, you will find dozens of protests happening all around you. Every day. Guaranteed. All you have to do is stand around, do a chant, and maybe (maybe!) hold a sign.

Justine (Lorenza Izzo) is just a bright eyed and bushy tailed freshmen in NYC. She gets interested in the activism, but her roommate (Sky Ferreira) thinks the local group on campus is too crazy. They plan to go to Peru! There is a logging company who is illegally taking out trees and threatening to remove local tribes from their homes! They will dress up like loggers, tie themselves to trees and record their actions straight onto the internet. That should stop them from hurting them and get people to care about their group and hate on the one company. Sweet. That goes fine enough. Outside of spoiler stuff.

The real issue occurs when they drive to leave the jungle. Something goes wrong with their plane, killing half of the crew as it crash lands back into the jungle. This is where they are quickly found by the local friendly natives. Just kidding, they are all painted red and totally scary. They tranq those college students and capture them to bring them back to their village.

And guess what? You already know what. They eat people! Yay!

Now they have to figure out how to survive the tribe, run away, survive in the jungle, and get back to America as soon as they can. And guess what, again! They ruined their best chance of escape by making the logging company stop their illegal actions. Life is a bitch some times.

Starring Ramon Llao and Antonieta Pari as the main two village people. As for our other activists, we have Aaron Burns, Nicolas Martinez, Magda Apanowicz, Daryl Sabara, Kirby Bliss Blanton, and Ariel Levy as our leader.

“What? Tribal mom got your tongue?”

I have heard some of Roth’s movies have been very graphic and hard to watch. Why the fuck would I ever want to go back and watch Hostel if that is true? The first major torture porn right, outside of some Saw movies? Well, The Green Inferno, if you didn’t already guess it, was very graphic and hard to watch.

I had to look away numerous times throughout the movie, my stomach unwilling to negotiate with the eye terrorists on the screen. Eating people it turns out can be pretty gross. Unfortunate, if everyone was simply just eaten, that’d be a boring and just gross film. They do a good job of keeping more of the deaths diverse so that it doesn’t get stagnant. Although watching that boy from the Spy Kid movies felt very weird for me.

As a horror film, it did its job in terms of grossing/creeping out the viewer. It definitely isn’t boring, outside of some of the earlier moments before they make it to the other country. It is super violent and should make you uncomfortable.

But it feels all very cheap at the same time. Overall the film lacks a lot of substance. It is trying to make a statement about social justice types, or America butting into things, or…something else. It just does it in a terrible way. “Don’t do this, or you will get eaten by the natives.” Cultural exploitation aside (which I do not care about), it isn’t a strong link and ruins any message it was trying to make.

For those who like gross stuff, this is your movie. If you want anything besides that, well…uh, not this movie then.

Buy It! – This movie is available now on {Blu-Ray} and {DVD}.

All Is Lost.

I don’t know a lot about this movie, but I am pretty sure it is about feeling hopeless and giving up. This would make it the polar opposite of the film, Never Back Down. I do know it was getting some Oscar hype but only appeared in the indie theaters an hour away, so I never went to see it. I also found out it was directed by J.C. Chandor, who has only ever done one other film, Margin Call, which I loved.

So, I guess that is a positive. Woo!

Shit son, that looks calm as fuck. Why are you so hopeless?

In this survival drama, we have one character, and very very little dialogue. You are going to be mostly left with scenery, special effects, and one man, (Robert Redford). His name isn’t given, so instead of just calling him man, I will just keep calling him Robert Redford.

The dialogue that exists mostly comes from the first scene of the boat, where Robert Redford is writing in a journal and we get some narration. Then we find out why he is drifting hopelessly in sea, by switching to 8 days earlier.

His boat crashes into a shipping container, floating in the ocean. We have a leak! This Robert Redford fellow is like MacGyver, very knowledgeable, and he quickly tries to fix the situation. Unfortunately, a lot of his communication and navigation equipment gets damaged. A boat is nice, but not knowing where you are in the ocean is scary.

What then follows is 90 more minutes of more and more shit progressively hitting the fan, as problem after problem occurs. Storms, capsizing, fires, damaged supplies, all of that.

You will feel hopeless if you pay attention to the movie. How long could you survive if you weren’t as smart as Robert Redford?

This is only like, two layers of shit hitting the fan at that point. I don’t want to spoil too much after all.

If anything All Is Lost is an intense film and certainly not for everyone. If you only have a short attention span, it might not be able to catch your grasp. If you really need dialogue to keep you interested in a movie, it might not be your cup of tea. If you want more than one character, then you are shit out of luck.

All Is Lost is definitely a beautiful film, and a nice film to see Robert Redford too. He has been on an upswing lately, not acting a lot in the first ten years of the 2000s, but in a lot more films recently, and it is good that he is willing to still try different and new things at his age.

I think the film was nicely made and decent, but I also know I never really want to see it again. I do like dialogue and hate it when I get nothing. All Is Lost makes me feel feels, but not feel feels that I will probably be able to recreate. After I know how it ends and learn what happens, I don’t think there is enough to entertain me as much a second time.

Sorry All Is Lost. Good luck on winning uh…Best Sound Editing.

Kids. Listen to me now.

Judging a movie by its cover is bad, we all know that. That is why I have to watch these movies and make sure they are bad, not just assume.

Well, the cover needs to be decent as well to get people interested in it, to give them a chance. The Day‘s cover isn’t too spectacular, but I at least knew some people in it. So why not give it a shot?

Fuck. Let’s do that thing where I show giant pictures to cover up the bad.

Hey. You played an evil chick in that one movie. I wonder if you are evil here too. You do look scurry.

Alright, so this story takes place in a post apocalyptic society. Something happened, people are dead, everything is scarce, and THIS MOVIE IS A LIE. IT IS ALL A LIE.

Google “The Day” and “Film” or something, check out the images. All nice color stuff, like the one above. Even the cover. But fuck you, that is not what the movie looks like in the slightest.

Oh you look quite a bit more sick there, little girl.

Yeah, that’s right. Fucking black and white-ish. Surprise! Didn’t expect that. You know, because it is basically lies in the form of advertising. I will judge it harshly. No, I didn’t think it was color before hand, but the black and white is ugly, and seems to be a last minute addition clearly.

Either way. Not many survivors. So we have a group of people who may or may not know each other. There used to be more, but they died. Now we just have five left. Rick (Dominic Monaghan), Henson (Cory Hardrict), Adam (Shawn Ashmore), Shannon (Shannyn Sossamon), and Mary (Ashley Bell).

Well, they happen upon a small house in the middle of no where, so they investigate. Oh, it has food. Too bad it also is super alarmed. Jokes on them, local cannibal tribes in the area have set up a trap! Now they have to fend off against 20 or more people. Uh oh.

So people die. Some faster than others. Some of them may be big names. If any of them survive by the end, does it really matter? The world is very bleak, after all.

Basically, the movie was shit, and it didn’t even decide to dress up like anything else. It wasn’t that long, but it took forever for the alarm to even go off. I bet this could have worked as a short film, 25 minutes max. It would have been entertaining and got the same point across.

But this movie is just filler. Extreme filler, and violence subdued thanks to the choice of filter. This is why I can’t have nice things. Hell, even the cannibals had no personality. I think I have only seen cannibals in about three movies now. One the most famous cannibal ever. This. And of course, a little musical.

All the personality one could ever imagine.