(don’t hover over the word spoiler)
College Student Justine (Lorenza Izzo) decides to meet with a student activist named Alejandro (Ariel Levy) when he and his group go on a hunger strike on behalf of underpaid janitors. Because she has a crush on Alejandro, she agrees to help him with his next project to save the Amazon. She will soon regret that decision when her plane crashes somewhere in the Peruvian jungle and after her and the rest of the group are captured by a tribe of spoiler.
First of all, you know a movie isn’t for everyone when you have to be ID’d before going in. I will say that it is rated R while most films (at least in Canada) are rated at most 18A but I did not let that dissuade me. I don’t know the difference between the two ratings but I guess it’s worse than 18A since they had to ID me and I never get ID’d when I see 18A films. As I have said on many occasions in other reviews, I was not familiar with other works of the film’s director Eli Roth so my review will be based on that. Now I will just say that this film is definitely not for everyone and it earns the R rating. There is one scene in particular, that I will not spoil, that I thought earned it that rating. There are other moments, however, that come close. I will say that I did not find this film very scary but I do not think that it was the film’s fault. I may have ruined it for myself because I was aware of the film’s premise beforehand. Knowing this did not completely ruin it for me but I probably could have figured it out on my own quickly enough and I would have been in the same position. The film felt more suspenseful to me because most of the plot focused on whether or not the students would survive their predicament. The story isn’t the most original I have ever seen for a horror film, a bunch of college students in the forest because that never ends well. I thought the story started off a little slowly for me. I found the buildup to their leaving for the Amazon to be a little boring and a little cheesy and bad. I felt like it could have just started with them in the Amazon and/or taking the time to introduce the characters that we will see because what we did see was little to no character development so we as viewers just don’t care about the characters or about what happens to them. I’ve always felt that horror films are better with character development because if you care about the characters, you are more scared when something happens to them. Justine and to a lesser extent Alejandro got some character development but I didn’t really care about them. I thought the acting was bad to mediocre but that wasn’t a surprise and I thought the film just got sillier the further it went. I was not a big fan of the end either. I will admit to laughing at certain moments where people died, yes people died because it’s a horror film. Overall. this isn’t a terrible film but I don’t think it’s one worth spending money on at the theater, more like a rental.
Score: 5.5/10
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The EIC of the coincidentally-named keithlovesmovies.com. A Canadian who prefers to get out of the cold and into the warmth of a movie theatre.