Starring: Robert Carlyle, Guy Pearce, Jeffrey Jones, Neal McDonough, David Arquette

Director: Antonia Bird
Released: 1999

Mood: If you’ve been debating putting someone else down to advance yourself and you need a bloody good reminder of why that’s wrong.

“It’s lonely being a cannibal. Tough making friends.”

Ravenous is such a bizarrely funny and brutally disgusting movie that I deeply regret renting it on Prime instead of buying it on DVD.

It’s got everything I love in a Western AND in a horror movie:

• Authentic sets and costumes
• Great casting
• Brutal action and realistic gore
• No jump-scares to give me heart palpitations
• One outstanding moustache

What I didn’t expect was the comedy element. The score, dialogue, and Robert Carlyle’s impish performance all make Ravenous like a fractured fairytale about cannibalism.

If you read all of that and you’re still interested, here’s some more to chew on.

Ravenous doesn’t waste any precious screentime. It opens with a scene in which Capt. John Boyd (Guy Pearce) is at a military dinner. Everyone around him is tearing into huge plates of meat. Boyd has a strong physical reaction and ends up running outside to hurl his guts out.

At the same time, Boyd has a series of flashbacks to the Mexican-American War, in which we see him panic and lie down on the battlefield. In the present, he’s told that despite his cowardice resulting in a larger win, he’s being shipped off to a remote outpost.

The outpost is run by Col. Hart (Jeffrey Jones), and the only other inhabitants are a handful of outcast soldiers and scouts: the pious Toffler (Jeremy Davies), the fearless Reich (Neal McDonough), the laconic Martha (Sheila Tousey), the perpetually drunk vet-turned-doctor Knox (Stephen Spinella), token scout George (Joseph Runningfox), and the perpetually stoned Cleaves (David Arquette, because why not).

• Fun Fact #1: David Arquette has been in more Westerns than icons like Tom Selleck and Viggo Mortensen: Ghost Brigade, Dead Man’s Walk, Wild Bill, Ravenous, Bone Tomahawk, the animated Quantum Cowboys, and an uncredited appearance in 1994’s Frank & Jesse.

One night a man is found lying in the snow within the fort. They revive him, and he identifies himself as Col. Ives (Roberty Carlyle). He tells them a terrible story of a wagon train that fell for that classic blunder: a guide promising a shortcut, and becoming stranded in a cave for the winter.

Ives explains that eventually they turned to cannibalism, and he fled while the last remaining female pioneer was left with the ravenous (yes, I went there) wagon master. The soldiers rally to go rescue the woman from this conveniently close-by cave, even though George has warned them or the Wendigo.

• Fun Fact #2: Ravenous draws inspiration from the Donner Party of 1847, Alfred ‘The Colorado Cannibal’ Packer’s season of cannibalism in 1874, and the cannibal terror of multiple Algonquin-speaking tribes, the Wendigo.

But Ives may not be who he claimed to be. Boyd may be suffering with a secret of his own. And in a surprise twist, someone else does a double-cross. Does anyone in this rag-tag group even deserve to survive?

Spoilers ahead!

Robert Carlyle is EVERYTHING in Ravenous. You want an anxious, traumatized victim? Check. A quivering, blood-fevered maniac? Check. Or perhaps you want an unflinching, determined killer with inhuman strength and speed, and just a dash of cheeky wit? Check and check.

Plus, he has the best moustache once he cleans up.

Guy Pearce is also fully immersed in his role, and don’t get me wrong – he does a fantastic job of the physicality. But because Boyd spends the entire movie doing this bleary-eyed stare, while suffering flashbacks and from the physical effort of resisting his blood lust, it often feels a bit one note.

• Fun Fact #3: Guy Pearce is a vegetarian, which may explain the vacant expression… but he did what had to be done, and shot multiple takes of taking bites of the ‘human’ (lamb) stew, spitting them out as soon as ‘cut’ was called.

Everyone else in the beleaguered troop delivers a memorable performance, and almost all of them get memorably horrific final scenes. One of the actors even gets two!

And through it all, Ravenous draws a poetic, blood-soaked parallel between violent cannibalism and Manifest Destiny.

• Fun Fact #4: Ravenous seems to do a better job than most white renditions of capturing the deeper significance of the Wendigo: a warning about stealing the autonomy, human rights, and thus the livelihood of others.

Ravenous is pleasingly, brutally realistic in its gore, and its action, and its storytelling. But then it tricks your brain with deadpan one-liners and a lilting, often jig-like score performed entirely with historically accurate instruments including the violin, guitar, banjo, jaw harp and squeeze box.

I realize that was another fun fact, but if you put two fun facts in a row it becomes a bullet list, and I already had one of those in this review.

Production burned through two directors before Antonia Bird came on board (the second possibly having earned a full-cast mutiny), but the final movie she created is great. The costumes feel wholly authentic, the small, intimate set of the fort lends extremely well to the tension, and the pacing is perfection.

Ravenous isn’t fully horror or properly Western. It’s an oddball hybrid monster, and I am totally thrilled to be part of its target audience.