Ravenous Review
by Scott Renshaw (renshaw AT inconnect DOT com)March 14th, 1999
RAVENOUS
(20th Century Fox)
Starring: Guy Pearce, Robert Carlyle, Jeffrey Jones, Jeremy Davies, David Arquette, Stephen Spinella.
Screenplay: Ted Griffin.
Producers: Adam Fields and David Heyman.
Director: Antonia Bird.
MPAA Rating: R (violence, gore, profanity)
Running Time: 100 minutes.
Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
It's okay for a horror film to be a metaphor; in fact, they can work best on an underlying psychological level. The original THE THING and INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS served as analogs to Cold War-era anti-Communist paranoia, while any number of takes on the vampire legend have delved into drug addiction effectively. A scary film can be more than just scary, but it shouldn't work so hard at it that the whole thing becomes a pretentious, preposterous mess. RAVENOUS is just such a convoluted concoction, throwing mountains of sub-text at its tale of cannibalism in the vain hope that something might stick, instead of merely "ick."
The setting for RAVENOUS is a remote U.S. Army outpost called Fort Spencer, a way-station hidden in the Sierra Nevadas of California circa 1847. Fort Spencer is the new assignment of Capt. John Boyd (Guy Pearce), a soldier bearing a tainted medal of honor after his cowardice led to an inadvertent triumph during the Spanish-American War. Boyd discovers that Fort Spencer is populated by an odd crew of outcasts -- introspective Col. Hart (Jeffrey Jones), peyote-fueled cook Cleaves (David Arquette), drunken doctor Knox (Stephen Spinella) -- but the strangest case is yet another new arrival. His name is Colqhoun (Robert Carlyle), a man discovered half-dead in the snow with quite a tale to tell. It's the a tale of a stranded westward party that turned into a cannibalistic feast, a tale of how the consumption of human flesh created a strange sort of monster.
Every once in a while, when RAVENOUS settles down for some good old-fashioned terror tension, you can almost enjoy it. There are a few nicely staged confrontations and creepy moments in Antonia Bird's direction (or perhaps that of Milcho Manchevski, the director replaced two weeks into production), including a sequence involving a sneak attack that builds far longer than you might think possible. Writer Ted Griffin slips a few darkly comic lines into the dialogue, and Robert Carlyle's manic performance helps support that tone whenever he's on screen.
How much more tolerable RAVENOUS might have been if Griffin and Bird had been content to let the black comedy guide them. Instead, it becomes a potpourri of narrative notions and random themes: the dehumanizing destruction of battle (i.e., war itself as cannibalism), the mad drive for the American frontier (i.e., the Manifest Destiny as cultural/ecological cannibalism), the equally mad drive for the gold in them thar hills (i.e., the Gold Rush as economic cannibalism), plus yet another gloss on addiction, and on and on to a dizzying degree, with the Native American myth of the Weendigo thrown in for good measure. Boyd's tortured quandary over whether to join this particular Diners' Club is played as such grand opera, infused with such socio-political baggage, that Guy Pearce looks like he's carrying the entire weight of Western Civilization on his shoulders in every scene.
No one's saying that the jaunty gruesomeness of EATING RAOUL is the only possible approach for a successful foray into same-species snacking. It may, however, be the best approach. When Jeffrey Jones is cracking wise while supping on a human stew, RAVENOUS begins to emerge from its coma of self-importance; when he pleads to be relieved of the misery of his hunger, you wonder when he suddenly developed a character of any significance. At a certain point, RAVENOUS becomes so consumed with putting a heady spin on its subject matter that it consumes itself. A horror film with something to say between shocks is fine. It's rare -- and annoying -- to find one that just won't shut up.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 hungry hungry humans: 4.
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