Ravenous

It's okay for a horror film to be a metaphor. In fact, that's generally when they work best, as in the Cold War paranoia of Invasion Of The Body Snatchers and the original The Thing. Ravenous, unfortunately, works so hard to be "about something" that the whole thing turns into a pretentious, convoluted mess. The setting is an army outpost in the Sierra Nevadas circa 1847, where the new commander (Guy Pearce) discovers the horrors of cannibalism when a raving, half-dead man (Robert Carlyle) stumbles in from the snow. Every once in a while the film settles down for some good old-fashioned terror tension, or slips in a few darkly comic lines of dialogue. Far more often it becomes a potpourri of narrative notions: the dehumanizing nature of battle (i.e. war itself as cannibalism); the mad drive for the American frontier (i.e. Manifest Destiny as cultural/ecological cannibalism); the equally mad drive for the gold in them thar hills (i.e. the Gold Rush as economic cannibalism); plus yet another gloss on addiction. Pearce's quandary over whether to join this particular Diners' Club is given such socio-political significance it's no wonder he looks like he's carrying the weight of Western Civilization in every scene. Jaunty gruesomeness may not be the only way to handle this subject matter, but whenever Ravenous emerges from its stupor of self-importance to crack wise, it appears to be best way--but that just doesn't happen enough. Not recommended. (S. Renshaw)