It starts almost like an episode of globe-trotting gourmet Anthony Bourdain’s “No Reservations.” A man gets on a plane wheeling a heavy round of cheese along the floor. At his destination, a big, gray sprawling mansion, he and three others chew blood sausage on a fork and rhapsodize as the butcher’s delivery arrives: “deer with soft eyes, flesh imbued with the perfumes of the Clouves forest … a hindquarter of beef from the rich pastures of Charolais…five dozen innocent salt-meadow lambs from Mont Saint-Michel.” One dances with the pale head of a cow. Inside, they suck marrow and slurp oysters.

In “La Grand Bouffe,” which means something akin to “Great Pig-Out,” four professional men, who take occasional weekend vacations to a mansion where they savor the finest liquor, food and erotic black and white slides of nekkid Victorian wimmin, have decided to take one final “gastronomic seminar” — to hire a passel of fun-loving prostitutes and stuff themselves to death on kidneys in burgundy, crepes suzette and sex.

No, we don’t know precisely why these guys want to kill themselves with food. I like to think they didn’t want to live in a France with a McDo in it.

Directed and written by Italian Marco Ferreri, with Spanish co-writer Rafael Azcona, this premise seems sort of like “Twilight” for the kind of middle-aged man who’s comfortable with phallic sculpture and whose morning routine includes stretching in a leotard. It’s wish-fulfillment for men who wear capris, use “voluminizing” hair products on their gray manes, and think a Bugatti is the epitome of automotive style (it’s not - the Citroën deux chevaux is).

But there’s surprisingly enough low-brow humor to make the whole thing not only bearable, but enjoyable. And the spread is drool-inducing, making the quail in a “sarcophagus” of puff pastry with foie gras and truffle sauce) Wikipedia uses to illustrate haute cuisine look like a dog’s dinner, as the irascible chef Gordon Ramsay would say.

The low-brow pairs well with the scrumptious plates - one guest is laid out with stomach distress, which turns into a surprising and extended fart joke. Another hefts Andrea, a teacher from the village enticed to join them for the weekend, sans robe, up onto a pizza-sized tart.

A French/Italian film from the 70s about gluttony, public fornication and suicide seems like it would be one big unintentional joke, a hifalultin emetic. Like it would take itself too seriously, pretend its pitiable characters were languid, desirous philosophers not to be tittered at. And fortunately, it is hilarious - just as it intended.

Ashley O’Dell reviews movies that aren’t in theaters anymore.