Movie review Ravenous

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Spoiler alerts - 1999 A supernatural horror Western with too much emphasis on dark comedy and ludicrous exposition. Guy Pearce plays Captain Boyd, a survivor of the American-Mexican war in the 1840’s. He survived a massacre of his unit by pretending to be already dead only to later heroically kill an important Mexican general and captures important ground in his efforts to escape. Unable to execute a war hero for cowardice the court imposes exile so Boyd finds himself sent to a remote fort in Sierra Nevada with a bunch of other misfits. The quiet life at the fort is disrupted when Colqhoun (Robert Carlysle) staggers in, with claims to have survived a cannibal massacre by the leader of his wagon train expedition, and begs the men to help look for other survivors. The fort’s resident Indian guide joins the search party along with Boyd, and warns them that men eating other men become possessed by a Wendigo demon, and extra strong. The search team find no survivors but discover that Colqhoun is the cannibal killer himself, actually called Ives, as he starts to massacre the searchers with relish and survives any wounds Boyd inflicts on him. Boyd escapes by hiding among the corpses of some of the corpses but ends up resorting to cannibalism with the bodies himself to get through the Winter. Boyd gets back to his fort where new men have replaced the missing ones. His story is not believed as Ives himself is at the Fort and shows no sign of the bullet wounds Boyd inflicted on him. Boyd is accused of being the real cannibal killer and chained up as Ives starts to kill and eat his way through the fort’s defenders. Boyd escapes, assisted by a cannibal survivor of Ives’s activities and chews more human flesh to increase his strength to go after Ives, intent to destroy himself in the process. Grotesque and absurd. People survive with a ridiculous amount of injury, and the characterization is often manic and over intense. The whole thing runs like a macabre farce but the horror is too graphic to be funny. The supernatural elements are under-stated. Though referenced and clearly at work, the Wendigo is never seen. Carlysle steals the film, chewing scenes up as much as the bodies he accumulates but the overall movie is just too silly to be credible. Arthur Chappell