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So bemoans U.S. Cavalry officer Hart (Jeffrey Jones) whilst trying to win a convert to his lifestyle in Ravenous, a whacked-out, genre-defying absurdity set in 1847 that does a schlock variation on the Donner Pass legend. True, soldier Hart gives mess kit a whole new meaning. Yet strangely, you kind of feel sorry for the crazy coot. For this is a movie of deranged moments, possessing little rhyme and even less reason. And as outlandish as director Antonia Bird's pretentious curiosity gets, one can't help but wonder what preposterous insanity will be perpetrated next. In a film of such profound inconsistencies and disregard for logic, anything is possible.
Miss Bird can't seem to decide if Ravenous, set in the Sierra Nevada but actually filmed in the Czech Republic, is a black comedy or a horror film. No matter, it's the sheer chutzpah of her blood-soaked effort and not the wholesale gristle that'll make your jaw drop. An interesting aside: Do you think popcorn sales go up or down during a showing of Ravenous?
In any case, the Saturday night blood-and-gore crowd will eat this slop up, while those who don't fit that film-going demography should definitely question their presence in the theatre. My convenient excuse for seeing this exercise in bad taste? Why, I'm the critic. However, I must relate that when the film reel broke just as the sanguine saga was about to head into act three, the unplanned respite to the lobby with my fellow viewers had me a little wary. Was it the power of suggestion, or was one leering audience member actually contemplating my right leg?
That possibility dutifully noted, back to the movie. Screenwriter Ted Griffin's unappetising saga begins with the introduction of Captain John Boyd (Guy Pearce), a brooding hero who fears that his experiences in the Mexican-American War may have compromised his status as a civilised human being. He suspects his dietary preferences have been unnaturally altered. A flashback notes that, while playing possum, he was carted behind enemy lines and virtually buried alive, piled amidst his dead fellow soldiers. So, he couldn't possibly help it when some of his commanding officer's O-negative dripped into his mouth. Charming, huh?
Later, an American Indian in residence at the fort where Boyd is stationed, explains the gruesome phenomenon of wendigo, whereupon one who partakes of another assumes the traits of his nutritional benefactor. Or, as the movie's tag line playfully notes, "You are who you eat." It was, after all, a sudden burst of strength and bravery that allowed Captain Boyd to capture the enemy fort and win his promotion. Hence, he is the accidental cannibal, a haunting secret that consumes his every thought.
But Boyd is small potatoes compared to Colqhoun. A wily Scotsman played by Robert Carlyle, Colqhoun ominously arrives at the fort one night, frost-bitten, weak and purportedly on death's doorstep. Having escaped from a dastardly scene where snowbound survivors began to pick on each other once the oxen and horses were depleted, Colqhoun admits his complicity, and a bit too gleefully, come to think of it.
Maybe it takes a cannibal to know one; Colqhoun instantly sniffs out and begins to chide Boyd; brothers under the skin and all that. But while the suggestion of compatriotism is abhorrent to Boyd, he listens intently just the same. Perhaps he can gain insight from a real gourmand and somehow shed his heinous affliction. The confirmed cannibal talks ghoulishly about the curative powers of his diet, claiming it has healed him of tuberculosis. But Boyd is further repulsed, and from this moment on a war of wills ensues between the two.
Meanwhile, Hart, the glibly philosophical colonel who looks more like Ben Franklin than an army officer, orders a rescue mission, with Colqhoun leading the soldiers to the cave in question. The findings are devastating, which causes the plot to take a one-hundred and eighty degree turn (hopefully, by this time you haven't become too attached to any of the two-dimensional members of Colonel Hart's rag-tag crew of motley soldiers).
Suffice it to note that the previously loony doings are now officially upgraded to entirely hairy. A case of purposely confused identity has us wondering who is and who is not a cannibal when Colonel Ives arrives to take command of the fort. Gosh, he sure looks like Colqhoun. How can that be? Boyd tries to warn his fellow troopers about their man-eating leader, and of course they are either too drunk or stupid to believe him. By now, the story has taken on the ethos and conventions of a vampire movie. And the film's Diner's Club members zealously wish to proselytise Boyd, insisting that it's a man-eat-man world -- eat or be eaten. The moral centre of the story, he resists. But for how long?
As if none of this was quite ludicrous enough, to her cockeyed ideas about ethics, bravery and table manners in general, filmmaker Bird feels compelled to add a sophomoric parallel between manifest destiny and cannibalism. Spreading his arms from one imaginary sea to the next, Mr. Carlyle's over-the-top wild man tells how America is destined to consume the entire continent. It's enough to make you say, puh-leeze. If memory serves, Horace Greeley said, "Go West young man." Not "Go West young man and eat a whole bunch of people while you're at it."
Miss Bird reminds of the ambitious high school student wishing to pad her essay with every fact and fancy, no matter how incongruous or sophistic. Just think: Ravenous is what happens when said student grows up and has about $15 million to blow on a movie project. It's enough to give you indigestion.
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