Ravenous (1999)
I came across this little gem one night when I was going through the digital cable guide to find some movies to record to the DVR. Ravenous was scheduled as a late night feature on Cinemax or something, and my interest was piqued because I vaguely remember kind of wanting to see it when it came out several years ago. Guy Pearce, Robert Carlyle, Jeffrey Jones, Neal McDonough, the late John Spencer...I figured I may as well watch it. [As an aside, the movie immediately following Ravenous on Cinemax was The Witches of Breastwick, which I opted not to record, despite being deeply amused by its title.]
I recall seeing commercials for this movie when I was a sophomore in college, but I don't think anyone was particularly interested in seeing it. Ravenous was marketed as some sort of horror/ thriller/testosterone-fest set about 150 years ago during the Mexican-American War, but that was about it. As it turns out, that description doesn't even begin to cover it. Yes, it's a horror film featuring blood, gore, and cannibalism (yum!), but it's also a totally whacked out black comedy. I dearly wish the humor angle had been promoted because I love black comedies with a passion.
The opening scene is disturbingly brilliant. Guy Pearce plays a U.S. Army Captain who is being honored for some war thing. His platoon (or unit? whatever) is having a celebratory meal consisting of huge chunks of bloody meat with meat on the side and meat for dessert. Everyone eats quite, ahem, ravenously while Guy Pearce tries not to throw up at this display. This whole scene is so off-kilter and gross, and it rather nicely sets up the whole raging, gluttonous cannibalism motif.
Later on, Guy Pearce is stationed at some remote outpost with a bunch of other weirdos. Jeffrey Jones is in charge, there's a drunken Major, Neal McDonough is a gorgeous and bat-shit insane Private, David Arquette is mercifully underused as another Private...and there's some other guys. Robert Carlyle shows up and is Scottish and crazy, but not before showing us his naked butt (again!). And then lots of people get eaten by other people. It's all pretty gross, but there's a certain amount of levity applied to the whole thing that I appreciated.
There were a couple of plot twists (that I totally did not see coming) that kept the film moving right along, so that was nice. One of these twists was, in retrospect, so completely obvious that I was embarrassed not to have guessed it was coming. But I think I was too busy being delighted by the silliness of it all. The other big plot twist come way the hell from left field and made an already surreal movie even that much more surreal, which was awesome. Throughout the whole thing, Guy Pearce's poor character does his best not to get eaten, to try to get some people to believe his crazy story, and to try not to eat too many people himself. Yeah, it's strange.
One particularly strange scene has Guy Pearce and Robert Carlyle fighting and rolling around on the ground and it just goes on and on. For a full two minutes, I was certain that they were going to start making out. Bizarre, that unexpected and awkward homo-eroticism.
I did laugh quite a bit during Ravenous, but I'm not quite sure how much of it was WITH the movie and how much was AT it. It was hard to tell whether they actually meant to be funny in certain parts, but I choose to believe that the whole thing, while largely repulsive and horrifying, was fairly tongue-in-cheek. In the end, I would say that Ravenous is more horror than comedy (as opposed to, say, Shaun of the Dead, which is more comedy than horror). And despite all the gratuitous carnage (not to mention my better judgment), I liked it. What can I say, it just made me smile.
*** out of ****