****
Cast: Guy Pearce, Robert Carlyle
Director: Antonia Bird
Rating: R18
Reviewer: Russell Baillie
Ravenous is happy to bite off more than it can chew and have a hearty chuckle while doing it.
Essentially it is an artful period-horror of cannibalism and cabin fever set in a mountainous frontier of the Old West - sort
of Dances with Wolves meets Braindead.
Though it is grim in both subject matter and wintry setting, its mordant humour makes it a wickedly funny original. And it is a film that comes unexpectantly with many a smart and stylish touch.
The most obvious is a cast lead by Pearce and Carlyle who, despite the gore-factor, certainly aren't slumming it after their respective recent Hollywood successes.
They help to turn this into high-class schlock - as does the script with its satirical edge and deadpan dialogue. Though when it alludes to something allegorical about American expansionism, consumerism and the like, it does become a mite strained and occasionally laughable.
A reluctant and shell-shocked hero of the Mexican-American war, Captain Boyd (Pearce) is sent to remote Fort Spencer in the Sierra Nevadas, an outpost manned by a motley crew of soldiers. One night a stranger (Carlyle) stumbles in out of the snow, explaining that he escaped from a group of westward-bound settlers stranded high in the mountains who turned to eating each other when their food ran out.
The fort mounts a rescue party with inevitable disastrous and buffet-like results. The surviving Boyd must battle the flesh-eating habit (which under the power of a local Native American myth takes hold like vampirism) while locked in a battle with Carlyle's stranger who, of course, isn't what he first seems.
Yes, it's blood-soaked and occasionally rather gory, though thankfully they largely prefer stews to roasts.
But it's the edgy humour and a taut tension - aided by a strange and wheezy soundtrack by Michael Nyman and Blur's Damon Albarn - that makes this a dark-hearted, stylish and scary hoot of a horror film.
No, not to everybody's taste. But one filmgoer's "yuck" has long been another's "yuk-yuk" and Ravenous offers big bites of both.
