82. Ravenous

Mention the word "cannibal," and most discerning filmgoers go running for the door. Messy consumption of one's fellow man rarely translates to a fun night at the movies, especially when it includes no name stars, a troubled production, and the dubious presence of David Arquette. Small wonder then, that audiences stayed away from Ravenous in droves. The surprise is how well it succeeds in spite of its handicaps. Part horror-western, part black comedy, part treatise on the price of manifest destiny, Ravenous features a truly original premise brought to terrific life by Antonia Bird (who took over when the first director left).

In one of his better performances, Guy Pierce plays a cowardly U.S. Army officer given a purgatorial assignment high in the Sierra Nevadas. The fort's skeleton company soon comes under assault from Ives (Robert Carlyle), a wolf-in-sheep's clothing whose taste for human flesh has granted him extraordinary strength and longevity. Bird eschews the obvious freak show shock tactics in favor of more thoughtful horrors -- Ives works to induct as well as consume, enticing others to join him as a means of purging their common guilt. The terror comes less from loss of life and limb than from the destruction of the soul, an old chestnut made new by the film's link to western expansionism.

Though Ravenous features some truly gruesome violence, it never comes across as gratuitous, and the use of humor is more darkly whimsical than sick (the sight of Carlyle emerging out of the howling wilderness resembles nothing so much as a fairy tale goblin, smuggled in by the Brothers Grimm to scare the pants off the rugged pioneers). Even the musical score shows far more texture and imagination than its unjustly maligned reputation suggests. Ravenous is certainly not to everyone's taste (no pun intended), but those attuned to its unique sense of the ghoulish will find it a rare and tasty treat. Who's up for steak? (Rob Vaux)