Ravenous

I love cinema. I mean, I truly LOVE cinema but sometimes you have the face the fact that it can be a pretty hypocrite business from time to time. Especially since the last ten years, everybody complains that there aren't any good horror movies being made. Only uninspired Scream clones and rip-off's. But that is a lie !! There are good and original thriller being made but they just don't get many attention because they are "politically incorrect". Ravenous is a perfect example of this. Made in 1999 and it stars a few familiar faces but it went straight to video in my country and I never saw it advertised. That's a real shame because movies like this prove that there are still young directors active who're creative and talented. It's up to the fans to discover movies like this and ignore the overload of mainstream slashers.

Ravenous has a very solid plot. simple but effective and supported by terrific acting performances. It shows a few of the darkest aspects of the human mind and, personally, I'm really intrigued by that. Subjects like Cannibalism and ancient Indian mythes are fascinating and when they're placed in a historical setting ( Mexican-American was of 1850 ) it even becomes better. This results in Ravenous being a very atmospheric and tense movie experience that you won't forget easily. The tension is built up slowly ( a bit too slow at first ) and the atmosphere of the cold and lonely Sierra Nevada is being portrayed very well. Guy Pierce is a great choice to play Captain John Boyd. His character is a cowardly figure with a complete lack of authority. He has to go through a battle himself and he's very messed up. The shows is obviously stolen by Robert Carlyle who is used to working with director Antonia Bird. His character is demonic and - duh - ravenous. A terrific performance and Carlyle manages to play his character with a lot of black humor and satanic charisma. David Arquette's role is pretty useless but it was great to see Jeffrey Jones again. Jones is a very decent actor and - even though he's frequently cast by Tim Burton - he's often overlooked and ignored. Ravenous is beautifully shot and some of the effects and make-up is pretty gruesome and explicit. But it isn't just mindless gore and violence so no complaints there. In fact, no complaints at all....Ravenous is a breath-taking movie from beginning till end and a must for anyone who believes that the genre of horror is dead.

If someone were to ask what Ravenous is all about, the easiest thing to say would be: `It's about cannibalism in a remote Army outpost in the 1800s.' That's exactly right, and that's probably what kept audience members away from Ravenous when it briefly ran in theaters back in 1999. Cannibalism? Who needs to watch that? Indeed.

Yes, there is cannibalism in Ravenous. Quite a lot of it, in fact. The film is steeped in murder, the eating of human flesh, and is flavored with madness. At times the film can be downright difficult to watch, though the compelling nature of the narrative keeps the viewer's eyes locked on the screen for the full ninety-eight minutes.

Ravenous is so much more than a meditation on people eating other people, though it's obvious there was a great deal of confusion about how exactly to present this dish to the public. Its plot is fairly simple for the first half: Mexican War hero (and hidden coward) Lt. Boyd, played by LA Confidential's Guy Pearce, is assigned to an end-of-the-Earth fortress in the western Sierra Nevadas. This fort, populated over the winter by a tiny handful of misfit officers and enlisted men, receives a visitor in the person of a starving man with an awful story of a failed mountain crossing that eclipses the Donner Party's. What happens then is so twisted, but skillfully crafted, that it would be criminal to spoil what transpires.

But Ravenous is not just a horror story. What lies at its heart is an allegory about man's relationship to other men and how society structures itself around the powerful and the powerless. Issues such as the morality of Manifest Destiny and even the ethics of simple meat eating are touched upon. Guy Pearce gives an underplayed performance so low-key that he almost vanishes into the film stock, while co-star Robert Carlyle (most recently in The World is Not Enough) plays opposite him with delightful nuance. The material even brings deeply textured work out of Tim Burton stalwart Jeffrey Jones as the commander of the fort, and scattered around these three are solid supporting actors like Jeremy Davies, who's much better here than he was in Saving Private Ryan, and David Arquette.

If anything works against Ravenous at all, it's the curious inclusion of humor at the outset of the picture. Director Antonia Bird, who also made Priest and Safe, is not known for her lighter side, which makes the appearance of a goofy epigram at the very start of the picture, and the use of some bizarrely inappropriate music during a later sequence, seem more like some producer's half-hearted attempt to blunt the sharp edge of the film's commentary with silliness.

Luckily for the viewer and the film, however, Ravenous is far too powerful a motion picture to be undercut in this fashion. By the time the final reel has passed, any memory of earlier missteps is forgotten as the pace grows more deliberate and the action becomes bloodier and bloodier up until the final moments.

Unjustly neglected on the screen, Ravenous is a film with a great deal to say. It's only too bad that cannibalism was the best way to say it.

This is an exceedingly well-made film which, in its portrayal of cannabalism, suggests other themes as well: physical and moral courage and cowardice, exploitation of other people, the evils of carnivorousness...

Taut-faced, moody Lt. John Boyd (Guy Pearce) turns yellow under fire in the Mexican War, but somehow manages to accidentally capture an enemy command post. He is rewarded with a medal, a promotion to Captain, and a transfer to a lonely outpost in the western Sierra Nevada range in California by a commanding officer who sees the cowardice behind the supposed heroism. There, a disheveled stranger (Robert Carlyle, doing his best Rasputin impersonation) stumbles into the post, telling a horrible tale of snowbound travellers in a wagon train feeding on each other when their food runs out. The affable C.O. (Jeffrey Jones, looking as seedy as you might expect an officer in a California outpost in the 1840's to look) decides to investigate, leading his small band of soldiers to a horrible destiny. Jeremy Davies, who played the nerdy corporal in "Saving Private Ryan" also appears, playing pretty much the same character.

All the parts in this movie were excellent - all the performances were outstanding, the photography and editing were great, and the score was amazing. However, although I really enjoyed this movie, it didn't add up as be the great film it should have been. Much of the time, I felt as if I should have been really scared and nervous, but I found myself watching with some detachment, almost as if I were watching a ball game between two teams I wasn't really rooting for.

I don't want the reader to think I didn't like this movie, though. It was really good. It just wasn't outstanding, that's all.

I did like Sheila Tousey as Martha, the Native American woman who lived and worked at the outpost. She was really cute in a sort of Earth Mother kind of way.

Antonia Bird's "Ravenous" is one of the finest low-budget horror movies of recent years.It's a brilliant mix of cannibalism,gruesome gore,sly black humour and quasi-philosophy.The script by Ted Griffin is absolutely stupendous.It's an irresistible blend of Native American legend(you absorb the strength or spirit of who you eat),the Donner tragedy,and the story of Sawney Bean.Bean with his wife and his numerous offspring,dwelt in a cave in Galloway,Scotland,during the sixteenth century.The family cave was close to the sea and they lived by highway robbery:ambushing,killing and then eating passers-by.Any parts of the body which they were not able to eat once were pickled in brine or hung in their cave.Over a period of twenty-five years it was proved that Bean and his family were estimated to have killed and eaten more than a thousand people.The acting is wonderful-Guy Pearce shines in a difficult role as a Lieutant John Boyd."Ravenous" was shot in the Czech Republic and Slovakia,and the landscape and climate is put to fantastic use.The score by Damon Albarn(of British band Blur)and Michael Nyman is very spooky and atmospheric.The film is loaded with brutal violence and gore,so if you're squeamish give it a miss.However if you're a horror fan with a taste for something dark and sinister,then you're in for a rare treat.Highly recommended.

I don't know whether the previous comments on this film show how badly the film was marketed (I never saw any advertising for it) or whether they're a terrible condemnation of just how tunnel-visioned people can be. This is only a horror film in the sense that Macbeth is or The Godfather. It's about the horror of monstrosity, particularly the monstrosity inside ourselves. It's not about cannibalism, nor is it a black comedy. It has those things in it, but they are not it's raison d'etre. It's about the horror of war, conquest, taking things which don't belong to you with the sole justification that that's how you get ahead in life. You have what the other man has literally by consuming it. The hero of this film is branded a coward when really all he's done is preserved himself from the madness going on around him, a fight in which he has no part, just like this one. And yet, I see reviewers here referring to his 'cowardice' as a given. They haven't even got to first base about questioning whether he might not actually be a coward in the first place. It looks like everybody's checked their brains in at the door with this one. I'm glad I never directed this movie, it would be soul-destroying to be this misunderstood. It's a great movie. Savage, brutal,poetic. You watch the whole thing with your mouth hanging open in sheer disbelief. It's a feast for the eyes and ears and has one of the most fey, eerie qualities I've ever seen in a film. It's a masterpiece and I would urge anyone out there who can leave their preconceptions and genre expectations at home to see it. Give yourself a treat - be amazed.