Paradiso infernale

Paradiso infernale got one great weakness - it lacks almost on all fields: there is not enough gore, not enough sleaze, not enough action, not enough cheese. What we mostly get are some cliched and watered down copy scenes of "serious" cannibal movies like Cannibal Ferox and Cannibal Holocaust, one could dare to say this one is made for a mainstream audience and taken away is most of the "spice" of such kind of trashy movies. To make things worse many of the scenes feel very disjointed, somewhat it looks that every idea that crossed the minds of the writers was somewhat squeezed in. Anyway, the flick got some funny scenes and there is some cheesy feel of a cheap Indiana Jones movie, so if you are on the trip to watch everything "cannibalistic" you can put this one on your to watch list, it won't kill you - neither by total joy nor by total boredom.

Adventure set in the Amazon, a small band of people go looking for a missing professor but encounter all manner of dangers. I saw this under the title Cannibal Holocaust 2, which is a total con. For a start there is NO cannibalism in this weak movie. Obviously the distributors retitled it from it's original titles, Natura Contro or The Green Inferno, to sell it on the back of Ruggero Deodato's original nightmare classic. This trash plays out like a comedy, only it's dumb, not funny in the slightest. The English version is badly dubbed but I'm sure even in Italian the acting would still be awful. Add to that some annoyingly bad 80's music, ridiculous script and terrible continuity this film really is best avoided. Monkey lovers may be best advised to give it a wide berth too, there's a fair bit of animal cruelty, though nowhere near as much as previous Italian entries.

Green Inferno (AKA Cannibal Holocaust II) is what you get if you suck all of the visceral power (and the cannibalism) out of Cannibal Holocaust. Like Deodato's infamous shocker, the film sees an intrepid female reporter and her team venture into the jungles of the Amazon to try and find a missing professor of anthropology. Unlike Deodato's film, it features no gruelling horror (unless you count the sight of a small carnivorous fish being extracted from a man's ass!), instead coming across like a National Geographic documentary crossed with a lame jungle adventure (with elements of humour). It certainly doesn't deserve to be associated with the king of all Italian cannibal movies.

Much of the film revolves around the protagonists stealing a plane and then trapping monkeys which they exchange for gas; this allows director Antonio Climati to include that genre staple -animal cruelty - but even these scenes lack the ability to shock or disgust (it's a wonder why he held back given his involvement with notorious mondo movies Africa Addio and Savage Man Savage Beast, both of which feature loads of animal violence). After successfully fuelling their stolen plane, the characters have a run in with angry natives that amounts to nothing, are attacked by bats, meet a topless jungle beauty, are captured by river pirates who are harvesting the organs of indigenous children, and eventually locate the missing professor, who is perfectly fine. No cannibalism involved whatsoever.

I was previously familiar with the 1988 Italian movie "Paradiso Infernale" by its English title "The Green Inferno" and I remember having seen the movie once, many, many years ago. So as I had the opportunity to sit down to watch the movie again here in 2023, I opted to do so. And I have to admit that I had fully and wholly forgotten about the storyline of the movie.

It sort of amazes me that writers Antonio Climati, Marco Merlo, Francesco Prosperi, Federico Moccia and Lorenzo Castellano could collectively manage to put together such a weak script and storyline for a movie. I suppose that five writers and creative minds working on a script just simply was diluting the creative output.

I found very little entertainment in "Paradiso Infernale", and I guess that is why I had forgotten all about the storyline here, because there was nothing noteworthy to be witnessed throughout the course of the 90 minutes that the movie ran for.

The acting performances in "Paradiso Infernale" were adequate enough. Needless to say that I wasn't familiar with the cast ensemble.

"Paradiso Infernale" is not a particularly outstanding movie experience, and for a movie such as this, with a cannibal theme, then there are actually far better and more enjoyable movies out there from around that same era of cinema.

My rating of "Paradiso Infernale" lands on a three out of ten stars.

Unfortunately, there are no "Cannibal", no "Holocaust" and actually no "II" in this movie. The story is something like BBC documentary supplied with poor and, in fact, unnecessary acting. It can't be compared to Deodato's "Cannibal Holocaust", the title of the subject is just the exploitation of Deodato's movie success.

Even some rather natural and, frankly speaking, amazing scenes, for example, with strange fish crawling in aborigine's fundament or the reanimation of a monkey with the help of rubber tube can't save the movie from total failure, at least in my eyes.

And I am sure that it will be completely useless and pretty disappointing for all Italian (cannibal) horror movies fans and for all that violence-lovers. And, for certain, it is not a must see movie for true cinemaddicts.