Ever hear of a movie with a premise so bonkers but with a fairly respectable cast that made you think you pretty much had to see it? For me, that’s happened a few times, but the most recent may the Western horror movie Ravenous. Chock full of recognizable character actors, it’s a film anchored by Guy Pearce and Robert Carlyle as two men who discover something horrifying on the American frontier and have very different reactions to said discovery.
Besides, Pearce is one of those actors I can honestly say I have seen and enjoyed in many things but every time I see him in something, I ask myself who it is until I see his name in the credits. I recognize his name before his face, like, every time.
Captain John Boyd (Pearce) is a decorated war hero in the Mexican-American War. He managed to somehow capture an entire command post by himself. Oddly enough, that was a product of cowardice and not bravery, causing his commanding officer to exile him to the run-down Fort Spencer. There, he’ll be under the command of the bookish Colonel Hart (Jeffrey Jones), alongside the fort’s drunken doctor Major Knox (Stephen Spinella), the timid and religious Private Toffler (Jeremy Davies), peyote fan Private Cleaves (David Arquette), macho man Private Reich (Neal McDonough), and the two Native scouts, brother and sister George (Joseph Runningfox) and Martha (Shelia Tousey, basically the only woman in the movie). It’s a lonely outpost that may soon see action as a waystation for the many people taking advantage of manifest destiny to head out west.
But then one day in stumbles a Scotsman named F.W. Colqhoun (Carlyle). He claims he was out in the middle of nowhere with a small settler group headed west when they ran out of food, forced to eat the dead to survive, but there’s still one survivor left, the lone woman in the expedition. But something about the story isn’t right, and with Martha and Cleaves off on a supply run, it’s up to George, Toffler, Hart, Reich, and Boyd to follow Colqhoun out to the cave where the woman was left behind. However, George mentioned something about a Native legend, the Wendigo, which can inhabit any human who has tasted the flesh of another. Boyd had accidentally ingested some blood while underneath a pile of corpses in the war, and the unearthly power he had temporarily acquired tells him this story may very well be true. Meanwhile, Colqhoun has a few secrets of his own, but he already admitted to cannibalism. And while Boyd is horrified by what he might have become, Colqhoun seems to have taken a decidedly different approach to things. Can Boyd get to the bottom of Colqhoun’s secrets?
So, I was expecting a weird movie, and I sure as hell got one. Carlyle’s character was reveling over his newfound skills and powers while wracking up the body count, all while Pearce’s Boyd wanted to stop him and couldn’t quite figure out how, particularly when Colqhoun seems to have been about five steps ahead of him the entire time. As it is, the movie seems to be playing up the idea of how the white man is and will be exploiting the land. George and Martha are the only ones who really know about and understand the Wendigo spirit while men like Colqhoun wish to exploit it for their own benefits without really getting what it really is. It’s appropriate then that the movie actually ends the way it does. The problem isn’t necessarily solved, but then again, if the idea is that settlers coming west will not understand the place they are coming to, then, well, that’s going to happen.
But that’s a deeper dive than a movie like this would probably ask of most viewers. And, all things being equal, I really liked this one. Everyone in the cast is just about perfect, the setting is mostly in a remote area to emphasize how alone the characters are, and Carlyle is pretty much the face of gleeful evil in this one, someone who has a message he wants to share and doesn’t seem to care how monstrous it is. Boyd meanwhile is a mass of contradictions. He wants to be the good one but may lack the willpower. He is decorated for bravery despite being a coward. He sees the horror of the situation without fully understanding it right away. The brutal and bloody climax is the only way it could have gone, and I was pleased to have finally scratched this particular itch.
Grade: B+
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