Ravenous

Ravenous (1999)

What It’s About: 2nd Lieutenant Boyd is a coward. He knows it, everyone else knows it, and he still gets a medal pinned on him for his “heroic” actions during the Mexican-American war of 1846-1848. After his commanding officer is killed right in front of him, Boyd decides to play possum and winds up tossed in a cart with the rest of the dead. Blood drips into his mouth, and a sudden adrenaline rush enables him to sneak into the enemy headquarters and capture it single-handedly. This, of course, does not absolve him of his initial cowardice, and he and his shiny new medal are reassigned to distant Fort Spencer.

Everyone else is there under similar circumstances, and as such, they’re kind of a useless bunch of people. They just sort of sit around, eat, talk and get stoned, because there’s fuck-all else to do in the Sierra Nevada mountains. Before long an unhinged stranger named Colqhoun stumbles into camp, claiming to be the survivor of a lost wagon train whose scout, Colonel Ives, deliberately led the wagons along a winding route and eventually encouraged the party to engage in cannibalism when the food ran out. Organizing a rescue party, Fort Spencer’s commanding officer, Colonel Hart, Boyd and the others follow Colqhoun out to the location of the stranded wagon train, only to find that they’ve walked right into a trap. And that’s only the first act.

Why You Should Watch It: Ravenous is a very weird little horror-comedy about wendigos, cannibalism and Manifest Destiny, directed by the late Antonia Bird (who’s probably much better known for 1994’s Priest) and starring Guy Pearce, the always-entertaining Robert Carlyle (who I really hope people are able to associate with something other than his turn as Rumpelstiltskin on Once Upon a Time) and Tim Burton mainstay Jeffrey Jones. It came out in 1999, right in the middle of my college career, and flopped pretty hard; it was not, for its time, an expensive movie to make, but it still only recuperated a quarter of its budget. And I can honestly see why it didn’t do well, which is sad because it really isn’t a bad movie at all, just a strange one that had essentially zero mainstream audience appeal, was shown in a very small number of theaters and was terribly mismarketed by Fox -- though it’s since become well-liked as a minor cult classic. The atmosphere is bleak and oppressive, reflecting what actually was a difficult shoot that only grew more troublesome over time due in part to uncooperative weather.

From the start, it’s clear that Ravenous is not meant to be taken entirely seriously. It’s a cannibal horror movie played mostly straight, but it maintains a distinct thread of very dark comedy throughout. From the opening quotes to the first murder scene -- which plays out more like a chase on Benny Hill than anything else, complete with banjo music, yodeling and a near-slapstick leap off a cliff -- it’s laced with satire and a morbid humor regarding the shrinking American frontier and the kind of people who are pushing it back.

There’s a point where Martha, the fort’s Native American medic and general chore-accomplisher, tells Boyd more about the Wendigo myth -- something he’d heard the basics of from George, the other Native American living at Fort Spencer (a scout who mostly spends his time smoking pot with his buddy, “the over-medicated Private Cleaves,” in a nice aversion of the old “Mystical Indian” stereotype). “The Wendigo only takes, and takes, and takes,” Martha tells him. “Never gives.” And it must keep killing to sustain its life; killing is an addiction in service to the beast’s hunger. It’s a statement that’s also clearly intended to apply to Western expansion as much as to the cannibal threat of Colonel Ives, who discusses Manifest Destiny more directly with Boyd in a later scene. American expansionism as a force both consumptive of everything in its path and, obviously, of itself.

“Now isn’t this civilized?” one character remarks as he sits down to eat some human stew.

Available On: Netflix, Amazon Prime.

New Feature Time! (Because I felt like adding a new feature.)

Trivia: The soundtrack was co-composed by Damon Albarn of Blur and Gorillaz.

I’m not posting the trailer for once, because it spoils literally every single twist in the film. You’re better off watching the movie without it.