MAY 21 - Ravenous

 

          Does anyone else have a thing where if your sleep schedule gets disrupted then so does your appetite? Cause yesterday morning, when I was planning on watching this movie, I woke up like an hour and a half earlier than I usually do and was super hungry all day. I don’t think I was actually hungry, because eating didn’t change anything. It was just the allusion of hunger, my body’s rhythms all screwed up. All this is to say, it was a weird mood in which to watch Ravenous.

            Ravenous, the 1999 feature by English director Antonia Bird, tells the story of Lieutenant John Boyd, who accidentally becomes a war hero during the Mexican-American War. He’s punished for his cowardice-turned-heroism with a shitty promotion to a backwater post in the California wilderness with a crew of military weirdos and misfits. Just when we have all the makings of a workplace comedy, a man named Calqhoun arrives, survivor of a group of westward travelers who got lost and turned to cannibalism. A trek into the wilderness to rescue the fellow survivors goes very, very wrong, and Boyd finds himself in a power struggle with a cunning cannibal, all while battling his own bloodlust.

            For all its brutality, Ravenous is surprisingly funny. The zippy editing, wry performances, and deliciously heightened score all create a tone of, well, not levity exactly, but of dark humor. More a comic horror movie than a horror comedy, it nonetheless finds the humor in its awful situations. I wasn’t expecting to smile so much during a cannibal flick. But don’t worry, it’s gross too. And for all this, it doesn’t feel tonally dissonant but rather like it has found its own distinct tone. Bird’s cannibals enjoy being cannibals; her central villain is a fun one, even as other characters resist or are conflicted about the choice to eat human flesh.

Just one of the wacky cast of characters you'll meet

            Wendigo folklore is referenced but its monsters seem plenty human to me. The cannibals here are greedy; they choose to indulge their monstrous appetites. This isn’t a story of demonic possession or uncontrollable appetite. Cannibalism becomes a metaphor for Manifest Destiny, a wry critique of the human cost of westward expansion. That’s why even our protagonist, who nobly resists and fights back, can’t help seeing himself in the monster. He’s part of it too. It’s a smarter movie than it might seem on the surface, and though its political critique is an understated undercurrent, it nonetheless permeates the film, occasionally bubbling to the surface in a memorable villain speech or a telling moment of dualism.

            Many horror films are about eating others in one way or another, including a good chunk of the movies in my lineup – vampires, werewolves, zombies, whatever was going on in The Wailing, all present the dilemma of living on others suffering. Ravenous applies that dilemma to the historical real-world analog of the Wild West, while giving its characters more autonomy than usual. Just, once you start eating people, it gets hard to stop. It boils the cannibal movie down to its core elements, picks an apt period setting, and lets loose its mayhem with a grin. A treat; I ate it up.

Havin a snack

             

Vibecheck: Bird ably recreated the Old West in Eastern Europe; her western landscape is cold, prickly, and worn. The action moves forward at a quick clip; hold on tight.

Scare Factor: Plenty of bright red blood and a few quick shots of mangled corpses; maybe not one to watch while eating but we steer clear of Fulci territory. A few good chase scenes and fight scenes build tension, but its more of an action movie whiplash pace than a white-knuckles thriller. The pacing keeps things light.

Pairs Well With: For all its political heft, the characterization of the Native American characters remains pretty thin. I’m adding Blood Quantum, a recent horror movie from a Native creative team and perspective, to my watch list to balance it. The Witch is another period horror film that begins with a banishment into the wilderness and engages a different moment of mythic United States history. Annihilation is another gripping horror tale of an expedition that goes sour. And, this might sound crazy, but the ensemble comedy moments reminded me of nothing so much as Galaxy Quest.

But how gay is it?: Very homosocial. You could throw a queer reading together here, I’m sure.

Girlfriend’s Corner: Fun fact: until 2016, my high school’s yearbook was called Windigo! No one’s entirely sure how the name came into use, but it was already the subject of well-deserved Conversations by the time my senior year was wrapping up in 2014, mostly because it was fun to point out that the yearbook staff, who were by and large the kind of gentle, vaguely queer girls who I spent all of high school desperately wishing I could be (crying face emoji), worked for a publication named after a cannibalistic Native spirit! (Of course, in retrospect, this was a deeply problematic act of cultural appropriation to have done on stolen land just miles from the traditional homelands of the Ojibwe, and I regret deeply not having called it out at the time.) Anyway, because of that specific and weird memory of my adolescence, whenever I read the word wendigo I think of my high school yearbooks and how much I hate my photos in them! I’ve considered running my school photos through FaceApp to correct the gender, printing them out, and taping them back into the yearbooks, just to reduce the cringe a little.

            Anyway! This movie sounds good, but somewhat gross. I am glad I played Gentle Zelda instead.