Open Road is taking a bite out of Eli Roth's The Green Inferno. The distributor nabbed U.S. rights to the gory cannibal movie, which is expected to get a wide release, The Hollywood Reporter said.

The film, produced and financed by Worldview Entertainment, is an homage to the notorious Italian cannibal movies of the late '70s and early '80s. It premiered worldwide on September 7 in the Midnight Madness section of the Toronto Film Festival. Roth directed for the first time since 2007's Hostel: Part II.

Set deep in the heart of the Amazon, The Green Inferno follows a group of student activists who travel to visit a dying tribe. When their plane crashes, they are taken hostage by the very natives they came to observe. Roth co-wrote the screenplay with Guillermo Amoedo.

“Filmmaker Eli Roth was literally discovered at the Toronto International Film Festival back in 2002 when his first feature Cabin Fever premiered as part of the "Midnight Madness" section. Since then, he's been back a number of times, with that movie's follow-up Hostel and last year with Aftershock, which he co-wrote, produced and starred in.

It's been six years since Roth directed a feature length film, which is why there's so much excitement surrounding The Green Inferno's premiere during the 25th Anniversary of "Midnight Madness." Roth also produced Ti West's latest movie The Sacrament, which didn't make it into "Midnight Madness," although it's not really a horror movie as such, more of a psychological thriller, although there are certainly interesting parallels and contrasts between the two movies.

The Green Inferno reunites much of the cast from Aftershock with Lorenza Izzo playing a college student from a prestigious family - her father is a lawyer at the United Nations - who is convinced by a charismatic activist name Alejandro (Ariel Levy) to travel down to Peru where large companies are tearing down the rain forest. Their idea is to disrupt the work and stop the endangerment of the area's indigenous tribe who rely on the trees to survive. Once they've accomplished what they set out to do and before you can say, "Sting was trying to save the rain forests first, Eli," their tiny prop plane goes down, killing roughly half of them. Those who died had it good as the half dozen survivors are found and captured by the local tribe and taken to their camp for reasons far more horrifying. They're thrown into a cage but not before watching the largest of them, the kindly Jonah, slaughtered, cooked and eaten by the tribe. Yes, kids, they have become the main course for one of the Amazon's main cannibal tribes. Nevermind the fact that they have plenty of cows and pigs everywhere, because everyone knows that human is the other, other white meat. Once you know where Roth is going with this, you can sit back and enjoy each of the survivors die in a spectacularly gory way thanks to the always great work of Greg Nicotero and Howard Berger of KNB EFX.

Roth has created a fun and interesting twist on the travelogue sub-genre of horror where a group of people go somewhere and enjoy a foreign land before being systematically slaughtered. In other words, it should sit nicely on the shelf next to Roth's previous films. What Roth brings to the mix as a far more experienced filmmaker is that the entire movie looks amazing, far better than many horror movies with twice the budget, and he also never loses sight of establishing the characters and making the audience actually care when something happens to them. As gory as the movie gets, you don't get the impression Roth enjoys killing off these characters, and that's the signs of a far more mature director although he does throw in a few low-brow gags in hopes of getting easy laughs,” Edward Douglas says in his review published at ShockTillYouDrop.

Roth and Worldview Entertainment are now planning a Green Inferno sequel, though Roth has decided not to direct. Instead, Nicolas Lopez (Aftershock) will tackle the follow-up.

The Green Inferno was one of six Worldview films premiering at Toronto, including Devil's Knot and Joe, which were both in play Wednesday, September 11 as the festival begins to wind down.