Whet Your Appetite For ‘Ravenous’

At one point in “Ravenous,” the new film by Antonia Bird, a character laments the strange turn that his life has taken.

“It’s lonely being a cannibal,” he says. “It’s hard making friends.”

Or hard keeping them, anyway. When human remains are the dish of the day, it gives a whole new meaning to the casual inquiry, “Hey, what’s eating you?”

Ba-dah-BOOM. Welcome to the world’s first cannibal comedy Western.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. The first real indication that “Ravenous” may be a comedy is the fact that director Bird has cast eccentric actor David Arquette (“Scream,” etc.). And he enters the action only after the film is well underway.

At first, “Ravenous” plays more like an anti-war study. Set in 1847, just after the Mexican War, a troubled veteran of that conflict has been posted to a remote fort in California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains. Stricken unto near-speechlessness after having barely survived the massacre of his command, Capt. John Boyd (Guy Pearce) understandably blanches at the sight of a table full of officers chowing down on great, bloody slabs of beef.

Unmanly behavior like that carries with it the brand of coward, which is what his fellow officers suspect Boyd of being anyway. It’s no wonder that he tends to sleepwalk through his new assignment.

Yet that’s when the film, lightened a bit by the presences of Arquette and the comic actor Jeffrey Jones (“Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”), again changes. This time it evolves into a kind of historical/ anthropological study, which at least answers the question of what life was like on the frontier when the nearest Zip Trip was several hundred miles (and more than a century) away.

Turns out it was a boring drudge of an existence, its inherent dreariness endured best by the dedicated (Neal McDonough as a super warrior), the drunken (Stephen Spinella as the fort’s doctor), the religious (Jeremy Davies), the cynical (Jones as the commanding officer) or the merely stupid (Arquette).

And then “Ravenous” makes its final transformation: A raving man (Robert Carlyle) staggers out of the snow-filled woods claiming to be the only survivor of a wagon train. The others, he claims, were all killed - and eaten - by a madman.

Doing its duty, the company heads out, intent on bringing the culprit to justice. Yet in the film’s most stirring scene, underscored by the music of Michael Nyman, the motley crew discovers to its horror that it has been tricked…

… and once again Boyd is forced to fight just to survive. This time, however, his struggle brings him face to face with an essential question: Should there be limits to what a man will do just to live through one more day?

Interesting query. Too bad director Bird doesn’t spend much time pursuing it. As she claimed at January’s Sundance Film Festival, where the film had its world premiere, “This is a fantastic fable.” It is, she said, “about taking power.”

So, what, the movie is supposed to work on a symbolic level as a look at Manifest Destiny? Are we to believe that just as the United States gobbled up land from Mexicans, French trappers, Indians and anyone else unlucky to get in the way, the characters of Bird’s film are supposed to be devouring each other as a means of attaining personal power?

OK, then why does the movie so eagerly embrace the standard horror movie cliches - remote locations, sudden violence, unspeakable evil passing as normalcy posing a frightful threat to our protagonist, and everything basted with generous doses of gore? If there is a philosophical subtext to “Ravenous,” it’s hidden under too much genre posturing to make any real impact.

If nothing else, Bird does prove that male directors don’t own a monopoly on the use of gratuitous violence. But that’s even less politically correct than it is politically coherent.

Ultimately, despite fine cinematography (the film was shot in the Czech Republic) and decent acting, especially from Carlyle and Jones, “Ravenous” is both less and more than its makers intended.

Less than a political statement, more than a vampire film, it doesn’t quite know where to go or even what to be - except, in the end, ridiculous.

“Ravenous” might put even Hannibal Lecter off his lunch.

“Ravenous” ** Locations: East Sprague, North Division, Showboat Credits: Directed by Antonia Bird, starring Guy Pearce, Robert Carlyle, Jeremy Davies, Jeffrey Jones, David Arquette, Neal McDonough, Sheila Tousey Running time: 1:40 Rating: R