A movie like Ravenous takes a very tender subject and turns it on its side. Cannibalism has always kind of been one of those odd topics for horror. The eating of human flesh is still a cliched trope but reports are coming out that it’s quite possible in the respective colonial and antebellum days of 17th and 18th Century America up until the Civil War that white people would consume enslaved black people as they viewed them as animals.
The 1975 exploitation movie Mandingo had the Ken Norton character being drowned in a huge of boiling water, even though the book reported went way darker on his fate. Set during the Mexican-American War, Ravenous is loosely inspired by the Donner Party which has been mostly exaggerated over the years. Not everyone who survived the wagon train over the Sierra Nevada during the snowbound winter months resorted to cannibalism. Recent true-life movies like Society of the Snow and In the Heart of the Sea portrayed cannibalism as a form of survival by desperate people.
Ravenous starts as Capt. John Boyd (Guy Pearce) has recently been promoted following his heroism during a recent battle. However, flashbacks show that Boyd actually suffered from post-traumatic stress and played dead. He was stockpiled under the bodies of others of which blood drained into his mouth. To his surprise, this gave him super strength and energy to climb out and take command of the enemy post.
However, his commanding officer Gen. Slauson (John Spencer) views him as a coward and sends him out to the the remote Fort Spencer in the Sierra Nevada Mountain range. It’s isolated with very few soldiers and two Indigenous Native Americans who are brother and sister. Fort Spencer is under the command of Col. Hart (Jeffrey Jones).
But very soon after Boyd’s arrival, they get a new guest from F.W. Colqhoun (Robert Carlyle), who appears disoriented, haggard and freezing cold. Colqhoun explains he was part of a wagon train party that sought refuge in a cave. However, they ate all the animals they had to stay alive and even Colqhoun’s own dog. And soon the others are cooking the legs of a person who died of malnourished.
Colqhoun claims their supposed guide Col. Ives resulted in killing the rest in the party except for him and the wife of another. So, Hart orders a rescue party for them to go out to the cave. However, they soon learn that Colqhoun hasn’t been telling the truth. But what keeps Ravenous from becoming a generic slasher is how it so well blends together multiple genres. On the surface it’s a western with a horror overtone. Yet, there are comedic elements to the movie that work hilariously.
When the young Private Toffler (Jeremy Davies), who’s also the fort’s emissary, gets injured, he finds himself being awaken at night by Colqhoun getting too close. Toffler screams to the others, “He was licking me.” And coming as it does less than a year after his crucial role as Corporal Upham in Saving Private Ryan, Toffler seems more like a 19th Century version of that character.
Casting is what makes this movie work perfectly. Take for instance, the role of Private Reich (Neal McDonough) who is first seen standing waste-high in freezing waters screaming as he endures the cold pain. McDonough who had just started out acting in brief roles on TV and in the movies in the 1990s really digs into the role of the badass tough as nail Army soldier who will do anything needed. David Arquette, fresh off the Scream movies, seems to work perfectly as Private Cleaves, the ne’er do well soldier who is constantly smoking certain things with the local Indigenous people, such as George (Joseph Runningfox).
George, himself, compares Colqhoun’s stories of eating human flesh and obtaining better health and strength to the mythical folklore of the Wendigo. Yet, this movie seems more like a variation of the vampire myth. Colqhoun says he was once dying of tuberculosis before he heard of the Indigenous people talking about eating human flesh to absorb a person’s soul and strength.
And even though it wasn’t too well known at the time, Ravenous also is influenced by the case of Alferd Packer, who reportedly led prospective miners into what is now modern-day Colorado during the winter of 1874. What happened during their travels as they got lost in the Rocky Mountains has been heavily debated and argued since his trial. Packer claimed it was one of the prospectors he was guiding who went mad and began to kill the other miners, echoing Colqhoun’s version of a Colonel Ives in the Sierra Nevada. Trey Parker, of South Park fame, made Cannibal! The Musical with fellow South Park co-creator Matt Stone in the mid-1990s.
Despite a good marketing campaign by 20th Century Fox featuring Pearce and Carlyle who both were very popular following the success of L.A. Confidential and The Full Monty respectively, Ravenous was a box-office disappointment when it premiered on March 19, 1999 in 1,040 cinemas grossing $1,040,727 averaging just over $1,000.70 per screen. It finished 18th in the first weekend. Overall, it only grossed $2,062,405 in North America against a $12 million budget.
Reviews were mixed with Roger Ebert recommending it with a three-star review. However, Janet Maslin of the New York Times compared the movie negatively to have “often better suited to a Monty Python skit.” It’s gone on to achieve cult status. The movie’s writer, Ted Griffin, would go on to write movies like Matchstick Men, Ocean’s Eleven and Tower Heist as well as writing for hit TV shows like The Shield.
Sadly, it would be the last feature movie directed by Antonia Bird, who would make the very controversial Priest. She would continue to work in TV for the rest of her life until she passed away on Oct. 24, 2013 from a rare form of anaplastic thyroid cancer. Hopefully, she lived long enough to see this movie get its cult status.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 