Meat is Murder (Ravenous (DVD))

Member Name: hogsflesh

Product:	Ravenous (DVD)
Date:	22/04/03 (77 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Four day week this week. Hooray for bank holidays!, God, I just realised I've been on dooyoo for two years now!

Disadvantages: I'm completely broke.

Ravenous, released briefly in 1999, is an unfairly overlooked little film. A darkly comic tale of cannibalism in nineteenth century America, it managed to both amuse and, at times, unsettle me. It seems that Hollywood is ill equipped to deal with genuinely interesting and innovative films these days. In a fair world Ravenous would be as well known as Blair Witch Project, and just as successful (it's the only Yank horror movie I've seen from the last few years that's as good as Blair Witch). Instead it's all but unknown.

The film is set during the US/Mexico war of the 1850s (I know nothing about this war, I'm afraid). John Boyd, played by Guy Pearce, has just been promoted to captain in the army. During a recent battle he managed to get behind enemy lines and take their command post. Unfortunately he only did this by losing his nerve on the battlefield, pretending to be dead and hiding under a huge pile of corpses. Obliged to promote him, his boss, General Slauson, knows full well that he's a coward, so posts him to an obscure fort in pre-gold-rush California to eke out the rest of his time in the army with the other losers there.

The fort is ruled by the avuncular, scholarly Colonel Hart (Jeffrey Jones). With him are a chronic alcoholic, a ludicrously devoted soldier, a meek religious fanatic, and a guy who enjoys sampling the local hallucinogens provided by the Native American servants. Just as Boyd is getting settled in, a stranger arrives at the camp, half-dead through starvation and exhaustion (Calquhoun, played by Robert Carlyle). He tells a hideous story - he and five other settlers became lost in the mountains over winter. Forced to shelter in a cave for months, trapped by the snow, they eventually resorted to cannibalism. One of the party in particular, the terrifying Colonel Ives, becomes a little too fond of his new diet, and Carlyle flees, leaving Ives alone with the remaining survivor, a lady.

Upon heari
ng this the soldiers race off to try and find the cave, hoping to rescue the final settler from the cannibal Ives before it's too late. Their Native American guide is particularly spooked, as a man who eats other men, in the mythology of his people, becomes a wendigo, a creature stronger and faster than normal men, and consumed by its appetite for human flesh. After a few strange happenings along the way they reach the cave. And then all kinds of cool things happen, but I can't possibly tell you what they are.

So it's basically a horror movie. There's quite a bit of gore and violence on display, both in the flashbacks to Boyd's battle and in the cannibal shenanigans that make up the second half of the film. But it doesn't really have any of the genre trappings you might expect - apart from a few moments here and there it doesn't build up suspense or try to make you jump, and although there is a fair bit of blood and dismemberment, it's never gratuitous. It's also generally quite light-hearted and funny - at no point are we really expected to take things entirely seriously. That doesn't stop it from providing the odd frisson of genuine unease, mind you - the descent into the cannibal's cave and what's found there is pretty uncanny. It sort of reminded me of Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and not just because it's about cannibalism. Both films are funny-but-with-dark-bits (although the dark bits are a lot darker in TCM).

It's well directed by Antonia Bird (who wasn't the first choice of director - usually when a film replaces directors part-way through it ends up as a terrible mess; not this time). It probably didn't have the biggest budget in film history, but looks very good throughout, with some great location shooting and panoramic mountain ranges (done in Eastern Europe somewhere). The sets and costume designs all look exactly right for the period setting (although some of my friends too
k exception to a big chunky jumper that Guy Pearce wears towards the end). The incidental music is by the unlikely pairing of Michael Nyman and Damon Albarn, and is very good, although I can't figure out what Albarn contributed, as it sounds like a normal Nyman soundtrack, just played on more ethnic instruments than usual.

The acting is pretty much perfect. Guy Pearce, a man with one of the weirdest career progressions ever, is his usual reliable self, doing a variation on his uptight and awkward shtick from LA Confidential, with a nice line in barely repressed hysteria thrown in. Robert Carlyle, always the most watchable actor from the Trainspotting bunch, is splendidly OTT throughout. Jeffrey Jones, veteran of many Tim Burton movies, is tremendous (he was recently arrested for possession of child porn, though, so it might not be OK to like him anymore, depending on how his case goes). David Arquette is funny as the perpetually stoned soldier, Jeremy Davies is excellent as the annoying Christian guy, and Neal McDonough (who was also in Band of Brothers) is great as the fanatical, gung-ho soldier, the only one who takes his job seriously.

Ravenous is crying out for wider recognition, it's well thought out and very entertaining. It seems that the problem may have been that they didn't know how to market it properly. The trailer (which is included on the DVD, although I'm not reviewing that, just the film) uses a 'wacky' voiceover, and tries to give the impression that the it's a wild, knockabout comedy, an impression reinforced by 'funny' captions at the very start of the film. Problem is, although it's a funny film in places, it isn't really an out and out laugh fest. And it doesn't look or feel like a horror movie, even though that's what at heart it is, so couldn't really be sold as such. And although it's a costume drama it doesn't have the kind of morally uplifting message that the
y usually have (except maybe for some vague vegetarian leanings), so may perhaps have been a bit disreputable for the art house crowd. Just goes to show you how worthless Hollywood has become. When a genuinely interesting little film comes along that defies easy categorisation they don't have the faintest idea what to do with it. A shame, as Ravenous deserves to be seen far more widely than it has been.

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