Ravenous is a tough movie to pin down. It's mostly horror but it has a twisted sense of humor throughout. It's tongue is planted firmly in cheek and it is not afraid to defy your expectations. When it came out in 1999, audiences avoided it en masse. The trailers didn't really give you an accurate version of what type of film you should expect. It sold it more as an action comedy and it is definitely not that. Not to mention the fact that 20th Century Fox barely promoted it and dumped it into theaters. Simply put, Ravenous is a tale of redemption with a heavy dose cannibalism thrown in. 

Guy Pearce plays Captain John Boyd, a veteran of the Mexican-American war. He is awarded for bravery but his superiors know that he is actually a coward who played dead when the battle was raging. As a punishment, they send him to a remote military outpost in the Sierra Nevada mountains. There he encounters your typical motley crew of rejects. The drunk, the religious nut, the stoner, the alpha male. Boyd keeps to himself and is withdrawn until a man named Colqhoun stumbles into the camp half-dead and with a story about being a guide for a group of settlers who got lost in the snow covered mountains. Together they all set out to rescue the settlers. And it wouldn't be much of a spoiler if I told you that things don't go well. 

The film had a trouble production involving the firing of two directors after filming had already started. One of them being Raja Gosnell, a man who is the definition of a hack. I shudder to think how he could have taken the subject matter and made an awkward mess of it. Eventually, Antonia Bird came in and made the film. Right from the start the movie announces itself as not your typical fare. The score from Michael Nyman and Blur frontman (and later, Gorillaz) Damon Albarn sets the weird tone that you're going to experience for the next 100 minutes. It defies description, especially because I am not at all musical and suck at describing what something sounds like, but it remains one of my favorite film scores ever and one that I still listen to frequently. That tone wavers from horror to comedy to thriller without causing whiplash. It lives within it's own genre and doesn't play by the rules that'd we've grown accustomed to expect. Boyd as our protagonist is a spineless wimp that is difficult to sympathize with but Pearce holds our attention and makes us kinda like Boyd despite his lack of character. The supporting cast made up of Jeffery Jones, David Arquette, Jeremy Davies and Neal McDonough are all fun and make their roles memorable but it's Robert Carlyle as Colqhoun that is the real standout. He plays Colqhoun as traumatized but a bit off and you know, if you've seen more than two movies in your life, that Colqhoun has a secret. And it's when that secret is revealed (it's in the trailers, and in the first paragraph) that the movie, and Carlyle, hit high gear. And while everything devolves into chaos, Bird shoots the movie wonderfully. She is not afraid of making the 1800s look as grimy as they actually were. This is not an idealized version of the west. Things are tough, the weather is harsh and the blood is sticky. The gorgeous shots of the mountains combined with the score, a score that actually uses period instruments, transport you to a version of the west you rarely see. All this in support of a strong story about how one man tries to find a way to redeem himself even if it costs him dearly. Boyd goes through hell and doesn't exactly come out of it intact. 

Ravenous is the type of film I like to champion. I've loved it ever since I first saw it in 1999 and keep trying to get more people to see it. It's at times hilarious and disgusting. Scary and mesmerizing. It's a shame that Antonia Bird never returned to the genre before she passed away last year. She made a film that will stick in your head long after you've seen it. And if you like it, spread the word. The cult of Ravenous has been slowly growing these past 15 years and there's plenty of room for new members.