Horror Extreme Movie Catalog

Some think trooper is best prepared boiled, with turnips, potatoes and cabbage. Others recommend that trooper be slow braised in red wine and onions, a kind of trooper bourguignon, which will produce a deep red sauce. Most, however, speak to trooper served simply, with a slight dusting of salt if available, and as fresh as can be.
--From Recipes for the Ravenous, from Ribald Rangers to Raw Recruits

With the exception of the last 10 minutes, Ravenous is a fine movie, full of revoltingly intelligent horror, with a disgustingly vivid storyline and nauseatingly moist close-ups. It's one of the best-photographed movies I've seen in a long time, and not just because of the entrails and caked blood. The movie looks cold to the bone, even inside the snow-laden huts and buildings that make up isolated Fort Spencer. The director, Antonia Bird, gives us strong story telling. The horror and the prospects of what we'll see are matched with restrained plotting and persuasive acting. The situation is outlandish and we can't help but smile at how cleverly Bird serves it up on a plate for us. At the same time, what happens to the characters isn't funny at all. It's Grand Guignol in the snow.

The movie is set in the late 1840's, high in the California Sierra Nevada mountains. Fort Spencer is a small outpost, with only eight men. Three are important to us. The rest are important for other reasons. There's Captain Boyd (Guy Pearce), who was a coward in the Mexican-American War. He wound up in a pile of corpses, their blood tricking into his mouth, but eventually did a heroic deed. He was awarded a medal and then promptly sent to the isolated Fort Spencer. There's Colonel Hart (Jeffrey Jones), the commanding officer of the detachment's seven men. And there is the ragged man (Robert Carlyle) who, one frigid night, nearly out of his mind and nearly dead of the cold, staggers to the fort. He says he is F. W. Colqhoun. He has quite a tale to tell. Part of it is true. The other part? Think of an old Indian legend that when one dines on another person, one gathers in that other person's strength. A bite of liver, a chew of thigh will set up a man for days with good humor and virility...heals wounds and cures sickness, too.

Whether California will be populated by settlers and gold prospectors or by military cannibals depends on a coward who is trying to fight his inclinations. That brings us to the showdown battle between two men who, having dined recently, have great strength. It's a battle that is loaded with big-fight, gruesome clichés. The movie is so sly and original that it's a shame it is stuck with a climax that is so predictably groan-slash-slice-stab-squirt. The final scene, involving a general and a pot of stew, seemed to me to be just a cheap final laugh. It made pointless Colonel Hart's integrity and Captain Boyd's bravery. It undercut the reason for the two men's final actions.

Robert Carlyle chews the snowy scenery but he's a fine actor. Guy Pearce has the tough job of being a frightened coward, yet brave and honorable when it comes down to it. Jeffrey Jones' as Colonel Hart gives the most intriguing performance, in my view. Hart looks like a disintegrating, heavy-set buffoon when we first meet him. He turns out to be a competent, thoughtful, well-educated officer who knows his men, knows himself and knows his job. And he knows the horror he's become. Jones gives a dramatic, ironic, likeable performance.

Ravenous is a first-class movie with a second-class ending.

I don't know how this one slipped by me in 1999. This was a fantastic film. You can't put your finger on why, until you watch it a few times.And you have to watch it a few times.