Remember The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and how you just couldn’t wait for that annoyingly whiny guy in the wheelchair to take a buzzsaw to the guts? Oh sure, you felt bad about it afterwards – for a while – but there was something so transgressively mean-spirited about it that it roused a sick-in-the-head chuckle every time it popped back into your mind. It almost made you want to give dear old Leatherface a big hug.

I’ll give Eli Roth this much: like Tobe Hooper, he understands that dark urge in the mind of your sicker kind of viewer (erm, that’d be me) and he sure knows how to pander to it. He and the makers of the toothsomely disreputable Final Destination franchise have a direct line to that part of the movie-going brain that hungers after a Grand Guignol, grindhouse/drive-in vibe of sleazy violence, simply for the sake of it. They love to make the audience hide their eyes behind their fingers and then cheer lustily at the inventive ways in which they rip off heads, sling entrails, and exult in the maximum spillage of plasma.

The Green Inferno comes after a seven-year hiatus for Roth, since his splendidly sanguinary Hostel II, and if it never quite scales the same operatic heights of gore and nastiness, it’ll more than do for now. Just as Hostels I and II pulsed with a quasi-Henry James-ian subtext of withering contempt for the Ugly American Abroad, Inferno takes a cynical view of First World Activism In The Third World. It sends its cast of bratty, entitled rich-kid environmentalists into the Amazon jungle, only for them to be serially diced and spliced, seasoned, roasted and eaten by the very tribe they think they’re trying to save from exploitation.

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“Exploitation”, of course, is key here: it’s an almost obsolete film-distributors’ term for material that pandered to the lowest instincts of film fans, from “roughies” (violent, misogynistic 60s sex movies), “nudie-cuties” (think Russ Meyer), maximum gore (Herschell Gordon Lewis, George Romero et al) and, for a short period in the late 70s and early 80s, zombies and cannibals. This period – dominated by Italian rip-offs of Romero’s 1978 masterpiece Dawn Of The Dead from directors such as Ruggero Deodado (director of Cannibal Holocaust, a touchstone movie, to whom Inferno is dedicated); Umberto Lenzi (Eaten Alive!); and Lucio Fulci, whose Zombi 2 was the first movie I ever saw at a drive-in – is the scarlet-tinted wellspring of Roth’s work, and boy, is he a devoted student.

Eyeballs are poked out and limbs detached from their still-living owners, as cynics and idealists alike are prepared for the cauldron and the spit; plus there’s an extra-nasty plane crash to boot. The Emerald Forest it ain’t! If it never quite lives up to its honourably scuzzy and ultra-violent forebears, it’s certainly not for lack of trying. Eat up!