Film Review: Cannibal film is an exploration of bad taste

Hannibal Lecter was hardly film’s first cannibal; he was just the first one in a movie “classy” enough to win some Oscars. For my money, you can keep Jonathan Demme’s look at the muteness of the mutton. Now “Five Came Back” (1939) ... there’s a cannibal movie. (Directed by John Farrow! Co-written by Nathanael West! Lucille Ball as the “fallen” woman!) Until the last 90 seconds, the tribe stays off camera — which is pretty much where I want my cannibals to be.

Eli Roth’s “The Green Inferno” offers us no such consideration. The cannibals show up about 40 minutes in, and they fill the remainder of the movie with frequent dismembering, disemboweling, optical enucleation, decapitation and threats of female genital mutilation — all lovingly photographed and involving characters we’ve come to know and occasionally like.

I’ll wait in the car.

Our heroine is Justine (Lorenza Izzo), a freshman at what appears to be Columbia. Justine’s father is a big deal at the U.N., and she expresses her rebellion by signing on for a demonstration against rapacious corporations bulldozing the Peruvian jungle and allegedly murdering whatever pockets of indigenous types are left. Under the dubious leadership of Alejandro (Ariel Levy), a dozen or so amateur crusaders hop on a plane, hug a few trees, and head back for the U.S. Unfortunately, the plane crashes, and they are taken prisoner by a stone-age-y, loincloth-clad tribe, whose culinary tastes are just as old school as their fashion sense.

The tribe has the students, one by one, for dinner. Will rescuers ever find them? Will Justine escape? Will Roth run out of stunt viscera?

There’s a certain air of smugness about “The Green Inferno.” The attitude of the story is reminiscent of a joke that went around during the ’70s: “Whatever happened to those counterculture idealists who took off to aid the oppressed?” “They all got mugged by the people they went to help.”

The movie is dedicated to “Ruggero,” presumably Ruggero Deodato, the genre’s best-known auteur. Ruggero’s 1980 “Cannibal Holocaust” became notorious for its genuine animal killings and supposed human killings. If I’ve ever seen it, I’ve blocked the experience out. (I am, you might say, a “Cannibal Holocaust” denier.)

There were gore films in the ’60s, but their blood-and-viscera effects tended to be unconvincing enough that the effect was humorously icky rather than genuinely disgusting. Deodato and Umberto Lenzi, among others, made the gore look real enough — in part by slaughtering real animals — that the results didn’t generally tickle the funny bone. (Insert your own joke here.)

Roth can’t be faulted on a technical level, but there isn’t a lot of pleasure to be gleaned. Maybe I’m getting old — well, I am getting old and so are the rest of you — but I had to cover my eyes frequently during the second half.

“The Green Inferno” is rated R. I can’t imagine how much violence it takes to get an NC-17.

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ANDY KLEIN is the film critic for Marquee. He can also be heard on “FilmWeek” on KPCC-FM (89.3).