Sometimes a movie will tank at the box office and fade into obscurity and one of the central reasons for that is because it just cannot be classified into one particular genre. Take a film like Ravenous, which opened to little fanfare in 1999 and could best be described “a cannibal/vampire horror western black comedy”. I remember originally seeing the trailer for Ravenous and not knowing what to make of it, but I was intrigued enough to give it a look. I wound up viewing it in a nearly-empty theater and after a particularly horrifying and gruesome sequence took place halfway through the film, I suddenly found myself breaking out into spontaneous laughter when goofy banjo music suddenly started playing on the soundtrack. While Ravenous didn t get a lot of hype when it was originally released, it had already made some waves because of a troubled production history. The first director on the project was Yugoslavian filmmaker Milcho Manchevski , who was replaced two weeks into shooting after numerous conflicts with the production company, Fox 2000. For whatever reason, his initial replacement was going to be Raja Gosnell… because when you want to make a dark horror-comedy about cannibalism, the most obvious choice is the man who directed Home Alone 3, Never Been Kissed and Big Momma’s House! Gosnell was pretty much rejected right away, so the directorial reins were handed over to Antonia Bird, who ran into numerous problems of her own with the studio and was dissatisfied with some of the changes they made to the film in post-production. Ravenous certainly has the feel of a movie with a troubled production history as the final result is wildly uneven at times, but that doesn’t mean it’s not tremendously entertaining.
Ravenous takes place in 1847 during the midst of the Mexican-American War. Captain John Boyd (Guy Pearce) is being hailed as a combat hero for singlehandedly capturing a Mexican outpost, but in actuality, he is a total coward. All he did on the battlefield was freeze up and play dead while the rest of his men were massacred, and he only wound up capturing the outpost because his enemies happened to transport his body inside there under a pile of corpses. Boyd s superiors know about his cowardice, so they decide to get rid of him by transferring him to a remote outpost in the Sierra Nevada called Fort Spencer, a place where nothing much happens. The fort’s commanding officer is Colonel Hart (Jeffrey Jones), who is supported by a ragtag crew of colourful soldiers: the perpetually drunk Major Knox (Stephen Spinella), the perpetually stoned Cleaves (David Arquette), the ultra-religious Toffler (Jeremy Davies), the ultra-intense Reich (Neal McDonough), and a brother-sister pairing of Native American scouts, Martha (Sheila Tousey) and George (Joseph Runningfox). One night, a freezing, malnourished stranger named Colqhoun (Robert Carlyle) arrives at the fort, claiming that he was part of a wagon train of settlers who got lost in a snowstorm and had to hide out inside a mountain cave for several months. When they ran out of food, the group was forced to resort to cannibalism, and Colqhoun decided to flee before he was to become the next meal of the group’s sadistic guide, Colonel Ives. Colqhoun soon leads the soldiers on a rescue mission back to the cave in search of survivors. However, it becomes obvious that something is wrong when Toffler wakes up one night to discover that Colqhoun is licking his bloody wound…
Of course, it soon becomes apparent that Colqhoun is not what appears to be and his own reasons for cannibalism: he is a believer in the Wendigo legend, where eating another man’s flesh allows you to consume his strength. Becoming a cannibal will make you strong and can save you from certain death, but the side effect is that you will become like a vampire and constantly need to satisfy your addictive hunger for human flesh. Captain Boyd soon finds himself in situations where he is forced to choose between cannibalism or death. Ravenous is probably the last movie in the world that you would ever want to show a vegetarian. Ironically enough, many of the people who made this movie were vegetarians themselves, including Antonia Bird and Guy Pearce who, when forced to eat meat during the filming of a scene, would instantly spit the meat out once the camera stopped rolling. Bird establishes that Ravenous is going to be something unique during a stylish opening sequence which intercuts between a group of soldiers eating steak and a pile of rotting corpses. It’s a scene which may cause even the most hardened meat lover to become queasy. Ravenous was written by Ted Griffin, who would go on to write the scripts for some very prominent films, including Ocean’s Eleven and Matchstick Men. He was obviously inspired by numerous real-life tales of lost settlers being forced to resort to cannibalism, including the Donner Party and the infamous Alferd Packer case. Packer’s story actually became the subject of its own dark comedy when an unknown Trey Parker and Matt Stone made Cannibal! The Musical, so finding humour in cannibalism is not uncharted territory. Ravenous can sometimes go from being horrifying to hilarious at the drop of a hat. One of the standout sequences is when the soldiers discover the horrifying truth about what happened in the settlers’ cave. The whole scene is very ominous and rife with tension… until the aforementioned banjo music suddenly starts playing!
The music score for Ravenous is by Michael Nyman and Damon Albarn, and it is certainly one of the most unique aspects of the film. Sometimes, the music sounds like your standard horror movie soundtrack while at other times, it sounds like it would be more at home in Raising Arizona! But then nothing in Ravenous is really portrayed in a conventional fashion. For the first half of the film, Captain Boyd is deliberately portrayed as one of the most useless, ineffectual “heroes” you’ll ever see, and the presence of a naturally likable actor like Guy Pearce is probably the only reason for the audience to care about him at all. However, this makes Boyd’s eventual resurgence in the film’s second half all the more effective and his climactic confrontation with Colqhoun packs a real punch. The role of Colqhoun is tailor-made for Robert Carlyle, who is clearly having a blast with his performance and is not afraid to chew the scenery (a perfectly suitable acting choice, given the subject matter). Strangely enough, Carlyle’s role in Ravenous turned to be a lot more satisfying than his much-anticipated turn as a Bond villain later that same year in The World is Not Enough. Even though she had never made a horror film before, Antonia Bird ultimately turned out to be the right choice to direct Ravenous. The movie is visually stunning and the atmosphere is suitably unsettling, as the cold, ominous isolation of the snow-covered settings really comes through onscreen. I’d like to say that Ravenous is one of the most underrated horror films of the 1990s, but since it cycles through so many different genres, it’s hard to simply classify it as a horror flick. That’s probably the main reason it never found a large audience. It’s hard to tell if Ravenous’ frequent changes in tone were a deliberate stylistic choice or a result of the movie being tinkered with so much in production. Whatever the case, horror fans and viewers with a taste for the macabre should find Ravenous satisfying and give it a chance. Just don’t make any plans to eat steak after you’ve seen it…