Weirdhouse Cinema: Ravenous
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Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema. This is Rob Lamb. And this is Joe McCormick. Today is July the 4th, Independence Day in the United States. As many of our American listeners can attest to, and I think our international listeners can also attest to, to varying degrees and understand, national patriotic holidays like this can be really weird to process.

They are at their very least a time of celebrating certain ideals while often ignoring the more complex or even problematic elements of a nation's history and place in the world. I often find myself just like end up with a day off on the 4th and I'm just like, what am I doing? What's the game plan? I guess I'll watch some fireworks.

And, you know, this year I made some space for today's movie. Oh, on the 4th of July itself or just in advance? Like, are you going to watch it again on the 4th? Who knows what I'll do? But I mean, you know, given publication delays, you know, I couldn't actually watch it on the 4th, but in anticipation of the 4th. I see.

Typically, if we watch a movie on the 4th of July, it's Jaws. That's, you know, for obvious reasons, 4th of July is a big holiday in the narrative of Jaws. It's very much a summer movie. And I don't know, it just kind of feels right, especially if the day involves like otherwise being outdoors or barbecuing or something. At some point you come inside, sit down and watch Jaws. I think we haven't really done this fully in a few years since my daughter was born, but yeah.

I don't know. I think we're working our way back up to it at some point. And another tradition we used to have, this may sound a little bit cheesy, but we used to like read Walt Whitman out loud in our house on the 4th of July. It's a good thing to do. I recommend that. Nice. Nice. Well, these are both solid, solid choices, especially Jaws.

And because, again, the greatest primordial summer blockbuster in many respects. I mean, it set the set the blueprint for blockbusters to follow. But also, you know, Jaws in its own interesting way at least dips its toes into some contemplation about about America. Hmm. I have to think about that. OK. Yeah.

Yeah, I think it's in there. But the picture that we've selected here is 1999's Ravenous.

Of note, this is only our second 1999 film. The only other film from 1999 that we've watched is Deep Blue Sea, a shark movie. Oh, OK. Interesting connection. You know, maybe it's not just the narrative of Jaws that ties into the Fourth of July. There is something very American feeling about the subgenre of the shark film. That's just part of the national identity.

Looking for connections between Deep Blue Sea and Ravenous. Not a huge amount in terms of, I don't know, the feel or content, but I guess they're both very much about eating. Yeah. Deep Blue Sea very much feels like a 1999 film. Ravenous...

in many ways just really feels out of place like it feels like maybe its soul is more seated i don't know in the 1970s or or in a way it's almost like a blueprint of things that might come later and as we'll discuss i don't think anybody knew what to do with this film when it came out in 1999 no one knew how to market it and nobody and a lot of people didn't really know how to receive it it

It is one of those artifacts like floating outside of time. It feels like it doesn't really fit in exactly anywhere. It is a strange, there are strange anachronisms within it. Like this is a period movie set in the 1840s and something I think especially about the soundtrack is,

leans a little bit into the sound of a 19th century music. You know, it involves like some accordion voicings and banjos and fiddles and things like that, but also has these electronic elements that kind of pull it out of the time space in which you're supposed to be imagining it.

And it as a result, it does kind of feel like this this alien object that's just kind of like inserted randomly into into the last hundred years of culture. Yeah. Yeah. The soundtrack, the score, especially as we'll discuss, gives it this kind of vibe of something ancient that is clawing its way up into the modern world. Yeah. Yeah.

So I originally saw this one back more or less when it first came out. I did not see it in the theaters. I don't know how many people actually did. I caught it on home video, maybe even VHS. I'm not sure. It was probably DVD. This was a time when DVD was really getting into the vibe. But I have to say, it really impressed me back then. I was a rather different person back then, but it still impressed me when I rewatched it today. I think

It certainly has its flaws, and we'll touch on some of those, but it's quite exceptional in its rumination on its central thesis, which it rolls out, I think, with enough care and nuance that it invites us to further ruminate on what this film means and what it's saying without transforming the picture into a kind of blunt instrument of social or political commentary.

you know, something about the, uh, the setting in time and in place and the fact that it takes place among kind of military officers, uh, within, you know, a couple of decades of the U S civil war makes it feel like it should have some kind of, uh, political historical commentary, whatever political historical commentary is there feels kind of subtle to me. Um, I,

I would say overall, the main themes are more of a classic morality struggle, but with gonzo Freddy Krueger elements. Yeah, I think that's right. Yeah, I think it ultimately strikes a nice balance in its commentary. I do think if it had been made 10 years ago instead of 26 years ago, I think it would have been more aggressive in its critique. I think it might have been a little blunter.

And I don't know. These are big what ifs, but I can easily imagine a picture that was ultimately less successful.

So if you're not familiar with 1999's Ravenous, this is a weird one. Ravenous is a frontier cannibal movie set in 1840s California. It draws clear inspiration from both the Donner Party and the confessions of alleged cannibal Alfred Packer. And there's also a dash of Wendigo lore from Algonquin folklore.

Now, given this premise, you might well expect a couple of different possible treatments. You might think, OK, this is going to be an exploitive horror movie. This is going to be like a gonzo, maybe even Euro cannibal film like we saw in the 70s and 80s, including Cannibal Apocalypse, which we've covered on Weird House Cinema, partially filmed right over here in Decatur.

I'd say there are some special effects sequences that are similar to Cannibal Apocalypse. Yeah. There's some kind of shoving of organs into the mouth. Yeah, they definitely get in there and paint with those brush strokes. But at the same time, it doesn't really go overboard there either. So if you come into this wanting like a complete gore fest scene,

it might not deliver, certainly by sort of like Fangoria standards. At the same time, yeah, you might think, well, this is about cannibalism, and cannibalism is inherently funny. There's no denying it. No matter how serious your treatment of cannibalism is,

You can't help but get a yuck in there, you know, somewhere or another, in part because cannibalism is such a dark topic. But then there it also there just so many potentially humorous wrinkles to the concept.

Cannibalism really lends itself to puns and wordplay, little double entendres in sentences. Have you noticed that? I feel like almost more than basically anything except sex, cannibalism is just like the double entendres leap out of the language for you. Right. Yeah.

And then they often go back into sex as well. So it's just it's all over the place. And so you might well think, well, this is going to be a, you know, a grisly comedy, maybe along the lines of Trey Parker's Cannibal the Musical, which came out in 1993, based in part on the Alfred Packer account, which I just referenced. And to be clear, this film does have its intentional laughs, but it also shows a great deal of restraint here as well.

Yeah, there is, I would say, a good bit of humor in this movie, but it's way less overt than in Cannibal the Musical. I mean, this is not in any sense played for comedy. Instead, it's one of those...

It's a dark story that is through and through dark on its face. And I think the viewer is expected to find little ironic amusements throughout it. You know, so like you're having a little chuckle, but there's nothing, no juicy comedy happening on screen. Yeah. Yeah.

So I think it's generally on the money to think of Ravenous as a horror film. Absolutely. I'm not going to make an argument that it doesn't belong in that section of the video rental store. But I think when you look at it, yeah, it...

It also tends to defy categorization in other ways. And I think the studio clearly didn't know what to make of it. Audiences and critics also tended to respond as such. I believe Ebert really liked it. But I think a lot of people just didn't know what to make of it.

No one really knew what to do with a serious minded cannibal slash sort of vampire frontier film reflecting on, you know, to a certain extent on the dark side of American destiny and capitalism or at least human nature. Yeah, I mean, nothing marketers hate more than something that takes too many words to describe. It's just like hard to market something that that doesn't really fit its genre tropes very well.

Yeah. And as such, the original marketing for this film is just I mostly just hate all of it. I hate all the posters and box art for it. It just all of it's just kind of like ugly looking. I don't like the trailer. And I don't think any of this has changed. It's weird. Like this is a film that has definitely developed its own cult following over the years. And it's readily available. It's been re-released recently.

you know, in Blu-ray and so forth. But the packaging is still more or less the same. I picked up the box at Videodrome here in Atlanta, and it's the recent Shout factory release, which is very nice. It has all these extras that were originally on the DVD release.

And it's the same description. The box states, quote, it's a recipe for nonstop action and excitement when the inhabitants of an isolated military outpost go up against a marauding band of cannibals in a deadly struggle for survival. That doesn't even accurately describe the plot. No. But it also gets the tone wrong. Yeah. Yeah. The tone is totally incorrect here. Like, I love this film, but it is not a recipe for nonstop action and excitement.

It is also it's not that this makes it sound like it's like a bunch of soldiers having a shootout with a cannibal gang that attacks them like it's Mad Max or something. Yeah. Or maybe the thing, you know, there's some comparisons to be made there. But yeah, totally different vibe. It's actually closer to the thing than what this makes it sound like. Yeah. Yeah. So my my my alternate elevator pitch for this would be cannibalism American style. But even that makes it sound like it's going to be more of a comedy than it actually is.

If I could give it a slightly pretentious elevator pitch, I'll cite a line from the movie. The characters in the movie discuss a, I believe, a Benjamin Franklin quote where they say, eat to live, don't live to eat. Now, that's an interesting aphorism. This movie explores what that aphorism means when you have to interrogate the meaning of both live and eat. Yes.

All right, I'm going to skip the trailer since I've already established that I don't really like it. I would recommend, if you've not seen the film, I'd recommend just going in cold and experiencing it. And, you know, don't even look at the box. Don't even look at the posters. But if you want to watch it on your own, it is widely available for digital rent and purchase. The Shout Factory Blu-ray is definitely the pick for physical media. It contains numerous extras, including no fewer than three commentary tracks.

I believe these were on the original release. This is just that period, I believe, for excitement regarding disc extras. So they just went all out. Yeah, yeah. I wouldn't be surprised if the original release of this movie on DVD had little Easter eggs in the menus. Oh, yes. Something you could navigate over to and click and it would play like a, I don't know,

know you'd have like a dancing Robert Carlyle oh absolutely yeah yeah this is when they did all of that stuff and I have to admit I haven't really gone into the extras on the disc I feel like this is sometimes I really like to do that with the film for a weird house and get more of the backstory this I really feel like is a film that just speaks so well for itself as itself and

But, you know, sometime down the line, I might really get into the extras because they look really good. You've got Carlisle and Bird doing a commentary track. You've got, you know, various other individuals involved in the production. And I'm sure it's all really good stuff.

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One thing I would say before we go any further is that, of course, always on Weird House Cinema, we end up talking about the plot in some amount of detail as we go on. And that will include spoilers for the story in cases where I think, you know, you might want to go in without anything spoiled. I throw a warning up. I think this is probably one of those. This is a movie where you might want to watch it without any of the surprises ruined. So so fair warning, folks, if.

you haven't seen the movie, you feel like you want to, this might be a good place to pause and go check it out before listening further. All right. We've given you the warning. So now we're going to get into the meat of

of the people involved in this production. Starting at the top, the director here is Antonia Bird, who lived 1951 through 2013, English TV and film director and also occasional producer. Her TV credits go back to the early 80s, working on various series and TV movies, including some work on the long-running series EastEnders. In 94, she directed the film Priest, starring Linus Roach.

Tom Wilkinson and Robert Carlyle, which earned her a BAFTA nomination, among other honors. She followed this up with 1995's Mad Love, no relation to the Peter Lorre picture. This one starred Chris O'Donnell and Drew Barrymore. But what if it had been a remake of Mad Love? Starring Chris O'Donnell and Drew Barrymore. Chris O'Donnell as... In the role of a lifetime. In the Peter Lorre role. Amazing.

She also did 1997's Face, a crime drama starring Robert Carlyle alongside Ray Winston. Ravenous would be her last feature film, but she continued to work in television, directing a handful of TV movies and episodes of shows like MI5 and Cracker. She was one of the UK's leading female directors by many estimates. She sadly passed away following a battle with cancer.

Now, it is important to include a brief note about the production here. So, first of all, just incidentally, this movie was filmed primarily in Slovakia in the Czech Republic. So, I think all of these scenes that are supposed to be the American frontier are actually Europe. And then the scenes that take place in Mexico were actually filmed in Mexico. Bird was apparently a last-minute replacement for a different director, a Macedonian director, Milcho Manchevsky.

And I'm not sure on the details there, ultimately not important, but amid discussions of who are we going to get into, who's going to step in and direct this picture now, getting down to the last minute, you know, the cast, everything, all these expensive pieces are in place. And it's Robert Carlyle who reportedly suggested that they get Bird based on his previous work with her.

It was clearly a good move. You can feel something about something that is really working in this movie is a kind of playfulness and a freedom to experiment that I think you can feel coming from the top. At least that's my sense in watching it.

Yeah, and I believe that's the sense that you get when you read interview pieces from Carlisle about the picture. So he had worked with her on episodes of TV's The Bill, Cracker, as well as an anthology series called Screenplay. The episode that Bird directed was a 1993 episode titled Safe that centered around homelessness and also featured Aidan Gillen and Kate Hardy.

So, yeah, he always he seems like he always spoke very highly of her, citing her collaborative spirit and her onset demeanor. In a 1999 interview with The Guardian that, to be clear, was promoting this picture, he said the following about power dynamics on productions.

Antonia is very different from most directors in thinking that way. The more you do in your career and the more success you get, you can pick and choose. But I've been confronted with a power thing from directors before, and that's what makes Antonia refreshing because she doesn't have that. It's a collaborative thing. It's about trust. And you build up trust over a period of years, and therefore you will do anything for each other. Oh, okay, yeah. So if I'm interpreting that right, that does match the feeling I get from watching the movie where it is...

You get the sense that...

this is the kind of production where people were just trying things. People might do something weird and then it's like, oh, that kind of works. Let's go with that. Instead of a director just draconianly bossing everybody around and saying, no, I've got a vision. Do it this way. And of course, all that makes sense when we get into the cast here in just a minute because it's a great cast of character actors and experienced stage and screen actors. And so you can really feel it all come together. Yeah.

All right, the screenplay is by Ted Griffin, born 1970. This was his first produced feature film script, but he followed it up with 2001's adaptation of Ocean's Eleven, based on a previous film from many years back. He also did 2003's Matchstick Men, the 2010 series Terriers, 2011's Tower Heist, and 2010's Solace. He also got into producing and co-produced 2013's The Wolf of Wall Street.

All right, heading up our cast, top build is Guy Pearce, playing the character Boyd. Born 1967, and I think everybody knows who Guy Pearce is, big name, Australian actor who really broke into the mainstream with his supporting role in 1997's L.A. Confidential.

I would argue Guy Pearce is really playing against type in this movie. He, again and again throughout his career, he plays characters that are very driven and kind of focused, competent people who are always the active party in the scene, always the agent. And here he plays the exact opposite, a character whose main vice is cowardice and indecision. Yeah.

Yeah, I think that's a great read because whether he's playing heroes or villains, he's

and he does both terrifically, it is generally a very driven character. And in this film, the character is intentionally presented as very passive for much of the film, resigned to whatever fate has seemingly chosen for him. And as such, he doesn't even seem to have much agency at first, and on the whole, speaks very little in the movie. Yeah, it's a weird choice to have a protagonist this way. There are multiple scenes where

Um, he is an officer in the military in this film, but, uh, he has like men underneath him who are having to kind of like give him orders essentially, cause he's just frozen and he doesn't know what to do. So prior to LA Confidential, his Australian credits included the cult favorite drag film, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, alongside Hugo Weaving and Terrence Stamp.

So this film pretty much follows up on the LA Confidential boom and precedes a string of early 2000 films. Christopher Nolan's Memento in 2000, of course. 2002's The Count of Monte Cristo. 2002's The Time Machine. Subsequent credits included such films as 2005's The Proposition, 2008's The Hurt Locker, 2009's The Road, 2012's Prometheus, 2013's Iron Man 3, in which he gets to play the

the chief villain. 2016's Brimstone, I believe that's another grim sort of western frontier picture. 2017's Alien Covenant, small but memorable role there. A turn as Scrooge in 2019's A Christmas Carol.

I haven't seen that, but I'm imagining it as Peter Weyland as Scrooge. So I hope that wouldn't disappoint. Dan Aykroyd in Nothing But Trouble as Scrooge. And then he's in 2024's The Shrouds. That's, I believe, the latest Cronenberg film. Haven't seen that one. And he's also in The Brutalist, for which he was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar.

Yeah. I always liked Guy Pearce and he is great in this, but once again, a very different kind of role for him.

All right. Now, coming back to Robert Carlyle, Robert Carlyle plays we're past spoilers at this point, so we can go and say that it's kind of a double role. He plays a character that it's initially identified as with the name Calhoun. But we come to know as Ives. There are a lot of great things about this movie, but I would say Robert Carlyle is the hub around which the spokes revolve here. He is the.

core of this movie and he's like the best thing in it he is driving this train and he is driving it right off the tracks and it and it's great he is fantastic

Yeah, he really gets to shine here. He gets to go in various directions. It's in many ways a Dracula role, in all the great ways that it's a Dracula role, but with all these other layers in place. Like he gets to play a frontier madman. He gets to play a cold, pragmatist villain. He gets to be this kind of embodiment of predatory capitalism and empire. And there are also subtle homoerotic layers to the character as well.

I don't think those are as pronounced, or at least they didn't jump out at me as much. But based on interviews I've seen with Carlisle, he does stress that it was part of the calculus of the character. So Carlisle is, of course, a noted Scottish actor whose credits go back to the late 80s, starring in TV with some small roles before starring in 1991's Riff Raff, which earned him a BAFTA nomination.

And it wasn't long after this that he worked with Bird on Safe and then worked with her again on Priest. The same year, 1994, he also appeared in a supporting role in the Robin Williams film Being Human. In 1996, he appeared in Danny Boyle's Trainspotting, playing the sadistic, oh, it's been a while since I've seen this. I think the character's name is Begbie. It's been forever. Yeah, Franco Begbie, I think. And this is a role he'd reprise in 2017's T2 Trainspotting.

He followed this up with 97's Face and The Full Monty. And this was another role he'd later reprise in 2013, The Full Monty TV Project. He was in 99's Plunkett and McClain. 99's The World is Not Enough. I forgot about this one, but he's a Bond villain. Oh, he's the villain of it? I've seen this movie, but I don't really remember. He is either, this is, yeah, I'm not a big fan of this era of Bond pictures, but he either plays the main villain or the chief henchman. Okay.

Okay. The world is not. Oh, is this the one with, um, yeah, sorry. Just had to look it up. She she's Dr. Christmas Jones. Oh, okay.

Yeah, I think I saw this, but maybe I didn't because I don't really remember any of this. It's a forgettable one. It's got a showdown in a nuclear submarine, I think, in the end. And Robert Carlyle, he's a villain called Renard. I had to look this up to jog my memory. I truly did not remember any of these details. Goldie is in it, the UK DJ musician. But yeah, maybe I haven't seen this one at all.

Well, it's not Robert Carlyle's fault that that one wasn't good. No, but more power to him for getting that Bond villain payday.

Let's see, that same year, though, he was in Angela's Ashes, and then in 2000, he was in The Beach. He played Adolf Hitler in the 2003 miniseries Hitler, The Rise of Evil. Other credits include 2007's Eragon, and also 28 weeks later from the same year. And he also played the role of sort of an updated version of Rumpelstiltskin on TV's Once Upon a Time, which ran from 2011 to 2018.

All right. Third billing for this picture is David Arquette playing the character Cleaves. Third billing. That's a strange choice. Yeah, yeah. I think, I guess they were capitalizing on his sort of like MTV era scream franchise celebrity status at the time. But this is a very minimal role, kind of a mild comic relief stoner character. I mean, he's good in his scenes. No offense to David Arquette at all, but he's...

More unhinged than I would have expected David Arquette to get, like his hysterical laughter at absolutely nothing and also like while he's getting gutted. Yeah. Yeah, I guess they, you know, when they were marketing it, they're like, you like Scream, right? Well, enjoy Ravenous.

Because, yeah, at this point, Scream 1 and 2 had already come out. The same year he starred in Never Been Kissed. Subsequent films include 2002's Eight-Legged Freaks, 2004's Never Die Alone, and also 2015's Bone Tomahawk, which, you know, is another weird Western frontier movie.

Oh, I remember having mixed feelings about that one because, uh, I thought like in some ways it was well-made, but also it just made me feel so nasty. Yeah. It's, it's kind of a, kind of a nasty one. I'm, I'm like, again, only 2015 and I, and I'm not sure it has aged well, but, uh, and I haven't gone back and rewatched it, but I, I enjoyed the experience when it came out, you know, Kurt Russell's great and everything, uh, and solid supporting cast in that one as well. Uh, yeah.

Who is it? Oh, man, who plays Richard Jenkins? Richard Jenkins is outstanding in that. He's great in it. Yeah, but I remember that one just being particularly just mean and vile. Yeah. All right, let's get into the more of the supporting cast here. We have Jeremy Davis playing Toffler, born 1969, American actor who the same year was part of the cast of Saving Private Ryan. He'd already appeared in 96's Twister. Subsequent films included 2002's Secretary as well as Solaris.

And he played Charles Manson in 2004's Helter Skelter. That was a TV film. And he also had roles on TV's Lost and Justified. It's weird to imagine him playing Charles Manson because he usually, once again against type there, he usually plays these kind of quiet, frightened, timid, mouse-like characters. Yeah. Yeah, he's like a sweet but...

but weird dude in this, uh, very religious. I, if we haven't mentioned it already, one of the whole things here is that all of the, the people that have been kind of exiled to this remote outpost in ravenous, they are all outcast of one sort of or another. They have been put here to be forgotten. This is the oubliette of the American frontier. Uh, yeah. All right. And then we have a, we have a major supporting character by the name of heart, uh,

played by Jeffrey Jones, born 1946. And this one is kind of a tough one to write about and to bring up here because Jones was one of, I think, the most beloved weirdo character actors of the 80s and 90s, noted for roles in such films as 84's Amadeus,

Of course, 1986 is Ferris Bueller's Day Off, in which he is the principal. He also has a fun villain role in Howard the Duck the same year. He's in 88's Beetlejuice, 92's Stay Tuned, and 1994's Ed Wood, in which he played the amazing Criswell. That's right.

On TV, he had a regular cast role on HBO's Deadwood, but of course, legal problems in 2002 with some really rough charges that I don't even want to get into here on the podcast, but the info is readily available on Wikipedia and everywhere else. This essentially ended his career.

At any rate, his on-screen work was always terrific, and he's great in this as Hart. Is it Colonel Hart? I don't necessarily remember everybody's military rank. But Hart is a very likable character and has a very nice, if perhaps a bit rushed, character arc. Which sets up a late movie twist that is, I remember back in the day was like a real gut punch.

Yeah, yeah. And I, yeah, it hit the same way, even though it was knowing it was coming. All right. We also have General Slauson. Great choice of a name because it sounds like it goes with barbecue. Played by John Spencer, who lived 1946 through 2005. Noted American actor. Best remembered for his role as Leo McGarry on TV's The West Wing. Other credits include 83's War Games, 89's Black Rain, 90's Presumed Innocence.

96 is The Rock and 97 is Copland. This was his last theatrical appearance. I was thinking of this character as General Cole Slauson. Yeah, they do those nicknames.

Yeah, he's really good at this. You know, your gruff authority figure. Everything that you would ask about that character. He does a good job. All right, we also, we have a return of a character actor that we previously talked about on the show. Steven Spinella plays Knox. Born 1956, American actor of stage, screen, and TV. We previously talked about him because he was in 1995's Virtuosity. He played the creepy Dr. Lindenmeyer. Is this the guy who ends up

He creates Sid 6.7, the Russell Crowe virtual reality murderer, but then starts worshipping him. Yes. Okay. Yes. Yeah. So, yeah, great creepy performance in Virtuosity. Totally different vibe here as he plays brash, terminally alcoholic Major Knox. His other main film credits include 2008's Milk, 2010's Rubber, and 2012's Lincoln. Solid performance here.

All right. Then we also have Reich. This is the character played by Neil McDonough, born 1956. Steely American tough guy actor whose first role was a dock worker in 1990s Darkman. He also popped up in 96's Star Trek First Contact. Really busted out with a role in 2001's Band of Brothers, followed by a key role in 2002's Minority Report. And he got to play M. Bison in the 2009 Street Fighter movie. Oh, okay. That's the later movie because... Yeah.

For me, M. Bison will always be Raul Julia. Oh, absolutely. Once Raul Julia has played a role, it's his forever. So, McDonough's good here. It's kind of a one-note role, but it's a good note. Yeah.

All right. And then we have a couple of Native American actors to round everything out. First, we have Joseph Running Fox playing the character of George. Born in 1955, Native American actor of the Pueblo Nation whose credits go back to 1978. He played the lead in the 1993 Geronimo TV movie. And since Ravenous has continued to work steadily, appearing in 2002's Skinwalkers, The Navajo Mysteries,

TV's Sons of Anarchy and also TV's Dark Winds. The character George is the scout who works at the fort here. And he is also the character who delivers the movie's core lore dump. Yes. So a minimal role, but an important one. And he's good.

And then we also have Sheila Towsie playing Martha. Born 1960, she's a Menominee and Stockbridge Muncie Native American actress whose credits include 1992's Thunderheart, 1995's Lord of Illusions, the Clive Barker film. I don't remember her from that, but that's one I've been tempted to revisit in recent years.

She pops up on TV's The X-Files. She was in 2002's Skinwalkers and 2005's Into the West. She was active from about 92 through 2005.

Her character's presence is limited, but she does play a kind of central role in giving one of the core moral exhortations in the movie. Especially it's interesting watching the movie multiple times because you might not fully understand what she's saying to Guy Pearce's character the first time you see it. And then it kind of makes more sense when you know the whole arc of the story. Yeah, Martha and George have important roles in being the

the characters who have some degree of understanding of what's actually happening. They provide a certain wisdom that has thus far been elusive for the Western characters in the picture.

All right. Briefly getting behind the camera here. Anthony B. Richman was a cinematographer on this, born 1942. His work goes back to the 1960s and includes such films as 73's Don't Look Now and 1976's The Man Who Fell to Earth. Wow. Yeah. He also worked on 92's Candyman and 95's Tales from the Hood and apparently is still working today.

That's a good resume. A bunch of great looking films. Yeah. Nicholas Rogue connection there. And I, you know, I'm not going to get into the producers, but I think there is a producer, executive producer, perhaps connection to some Nicholas Rogue pictures as well.

Okay, but now we should talk just a little bit about the score. In my opinion, Ravenous boasts one of the most original and effective scores that I can think of, certainly from this time period. Painting a rich sonic tapestry that includes discordant renditions of patriotic anthems and American frontier banjo music, some of which I've read was performed by non-musicians that were gathered together for the project.

You have tape loops, you have brooding primal beats, electronic distortion, in addition to some more traditional movie score flourishes. Yeah, that's right. The score is extremely varied. It's all over the place and all different kinds of music.

genres and textures and it comes together quite well. This is, I would agree with you, the score is one of the strongest elements of the movie, which is overall very strong. And it really stands out to me. I think the music is fantastic, especially because there are so many moments where the music, it seems like it doesn't quite fit in one way or another, like it doesn't fit the time period or it doesn't fit the mood of the scene, but then it

kind of does like it just continues and then it resolves and reaches this state where it does feel right in a way that it kind of rewards your your earlier trust in this tension created between sound and picture and I don't know it's it's it's a very interesting feeling that it creates in the film and this is one that I would like to have music from this movie just on a record and

Yeah, it was released on CD, and I know that I either had the CD or some MP3s ripped from the CD back in the day. But as of this recording, I don't think it's available to stream anywhere aside from YouTube as probably a user upload situation. And as far as I can tell, it has never been released on vinyl. It seems like this would be a no-brainer for a really cool blood-red vinyl release, but I don't know how the rights for those sorts of things work.

Apparently the music here is a joint composition of two different musicians, though it's sometimes a tangled web to try to figure out which one did what. Apparently it was ultimately like a 60-40 split.

and the credit order depends on whether you're looking at the film or the published album. But the two gentlemen involved here are Damon Albern and Michael Nyman. Damon Albern, born 1968, is of course the illustrious English musician best known for his work with the British band Blur, who had a string of hits that I mostly know from their inclusion in various DJ mixes from the

from the 90s. But then he would go on to be the key creative force and lead vocalist on the Gorillaz Project.

I believe his only other film score or soundtrack work is a 2001 film called 101 Reykjavik. That's another collaboration. So really not much that's directly film oriented outside of that and ravenous, but he's worked in all manner of musical projects, including things like operas throughout the course of his career. Yeah, if nothing else, you're familiar with Gorillaz and his work is fabulous.

There are actually moments in the movie where I don't know if he's using exactly the same electronic instruments or voicings, but there are moments where I hear bits of the first gorillas album. Oh, uh, like there's a kind of, uh, electronic piano tone used, uh, in, in a loop throughout the, the, their hit Clint Eastwood that I hear that same tone in the soundtrack here. Um,

And there's just stuff like that that feels very familiar to Gorillaz fans. Oh, yeah, that would make sense.

Now, as for Michael Nyman, born 1944, English composer, pianist, filmmaker as well in his own right, his best received scores in addition to this one include his work on 1989's The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, 1998's Gattaca, 2000's The End of the Affair and 2014's The Piano. His other scores include 1991's Prospero's Books, 94's Mesmer and 1996's The Ogre.

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All right. Is it time to talk about the plot? Yes, let's do so. Okay. We get a couple of epigraphs right at the start. One is a quote attributed to Friedrich Nietzsche that says, he that fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. The relationship of that to the plot will become apparent as we talk more. And then you get a second quote that comes in, which is attributed to Anonymous, and it is, eat me. Yeah.

This, I like this, but this also maybe feels like a late studio attempt to sort of try and control how people are going to consume this picture. But I don't know exactly whose choice this was. I don't know. It still works. Is this the chef coming out and telling you how to eat your food? Yeah. Yeah.

But overall, I love this because we're instantly hit with that squeaky, perhaps non-musician frontier band rendition of the American patriotic song Hail Columbia. Yeah.

Which sounds fabulous here. But when you look up the lyrics, it fits pretty well to what we're about to see. Hail Columbia, happy land. Hail ye heroes, heaven-born band, who fought and bled in freedom's cause. Who fought and bled in freedom's cause. Yeah.

Yeah. So we start with, of course, that kind of music. It's patriotic military marching band kind of music. And we see a waving American flag and that with fewer stars, though, than the flag you're used to, because this is the 1840s. And then we see a banquet hall with a long table, a bunch of place settings, patriotic regalia, and it's lined by officers in full uniform. So this is some kind of ceremony. Yeah.

And we hear a voice saying for heroism beyond the call of duty for successfully infiltrating the enemy's ranks and securing victory independently with cunning and honor. We, we see Guy Pearce here in uniform as captain John Boyd. Uh, and he is ready to receive a medal for his meritorious service. We also get a glimpse of John Spencer as the general presiding over this ceremony. This is general Slauson, uh,

And then we cut back to Boyd looking kind of uneasy as we get a sudden flashback to the midst of battle. So we see him in a very different place. There's gunshots ringing out on this hillside, smoke everywhere. This is supposed to be the Mexican-American War. So it's a Mexican kind of landscape. And then Guy Pearce is kind of falling to his knees in the middle of the battlefield.

as if his strength has left him. And of course, we get a title telling us it's the Mexican-American War. The year is 1847.

A chaplain says a blessing, and then all of the officers here at this banquet sit down at their places at the long table, and they dig in. And the meal appears to be steak and nothing else. Not even a little salad, baked potato, some creamed spinach, nothing. But, of course, then I remembered that this film takes place before vegetables were invented. Yeah.

I was reminded a bit in this of a later film, 2007's There Will Be Blood, in which Daniel Day-Lewis, his character Daniel Plainview, at one point is in a restaurant with his son and he orders, quote, two steaks, a whiskey and a water for him.

And we never get to actually see that meal, but I had a false memory that I had seen it because I just imagine it coming out just like that. Just two steaks, no vegetables, one glass of whiskey, one glass of water. Though I believe there is a later key scene in which Plainview is enjoying a plate of just steak.

I mean, I don't know how steakhouses worked back then. Maybe that was a more normal kind of meal to eat. But no, I have to imagine even back then, people would probably want some more variety. You'd want some starch, some sides, some vegetables, something in there, like just a plate of steak.

The last time I went to a certified steak restaurant before I gave up steak, I do remember it being a situation where you order the steak and then you have to pay extra for anything else, any sides. Which kind of, I mean, I guess the idea is that's just how it's priced out and all. Maybe that's tradition. But it also kind of felt like, oh, if you want to get anything in addition to the meat, you better pay for it. You're paying extra for that, buddy. The steak stands alone.

Yeah, I think that it sort of makes sense, like because you can choose like you get to pick your sides a la carte. So you pick your favorite. So it's not just like, you know, oh, this is what comes with it.

But yeah, I see what you're saying there. You know, the cream spinach is the classic steakhouse side. I feel like at least in the, I don't know how far back that tradition goes, but I think even in the 1840s, you got to give them some cream spinach or something. In this case, they were not able to requisition some cream spinach for the troops. Yeah.

So everybody noisily digs into their steak and nothing else. And you can really just hear them making sounds like the movie plays up the disgustingness of the eating noises. And it's like nom, nom, nom, nom.

And, uh, as this happens, Boyd is sitting there, the only person not eating all his peers are shoveling the meat into their mouths. And you can see him feeling anxiety. Like his breathing is shallow and he's looking around nervously. And then they also show Boyd's plate, which looks disgusting. It's got this gross looking gray cut of, I think this is beef shank, which is.

Also is confusing because that is not typically prepared as a steak. That's going to be tough as rubber. If you eat shank, you have to cook it a long time, like in a stew or something. So it's just like a steak of beef shank sitting in a puddle of juice that has clearly been modified to look less like regular steak juices and more like fresh red blood. It looks like thick and bright red. Yeah.

Here, Boyd has another flashback to battle, this time to lying pinned down on the ground in a pile of dead bodies, covered in blood, gasping for breath.

And eventually the association overwhelms him. He bolts up, gets up from the banquet table, runs outside and vomits. And then we get the title, Ravenous. Yeah, and I think this is where that unsettling banjo music begins to kick in. A ditty that we'll continue to hear over and over again throughout the picture. So really at every key moment in the film, the music is right there, amping everything up and at times like subtly twisting your expectations. Yeah.

So the next thing we see is John Spencer as the general giving Boyd a real dressing down in private. He tells Boyd that he is not actually a hero and he wants him as far away from his company as possible. So Boyd is sent away on a new assignment to a remote frontier fort in California called Fort Spencer.

We see Boyd in a few little scenes making his journey across a background of these huge black snow-covered mountains. I think these are supposed to be the Sierra Nevadas and millions of acres of dark green forest, just this wild landscape. So Fort Spencer is sparsely occupied. It's this outpost in a meadow in view of the mountains built mostly of wood surrounded by a palisade wall.

And the accommodations are pretty grungy. Boyd gets shown his quarters. He sort of like tests the give of the bedroll and then looks at it, looks at himself in this dim spotted mirror. In this sequence, we also briefly meet the character Martha, played by Sheila Tousey. And this is a Native American woman who works at the fort. And she brings Boyd some blankets here. Eventually, Boyd has to go for a meeting with the commander of the fort, Colonel Hart, who is a

at least at first portrayed as kindly mild mannered and a bit odd. Uh, we see him dressed up with a large blanket or cloak kind of covering his uniform. And he's often like this when we see him, he's got something kind of draped over him that just turns him into a kind of mass, uh,

Um, and he's wearing what looks like two different pairs of eyeglasses at the same time. One set up on the bridge of his nose and another down near the tip, I guess for reading. I don't understand if that was like a thing people commonly did back then or, uh, I don't know. I, I haven't caught myself doing that with my own reading glasses yet. It does contribute to making him seem kind of odd. Well, you know, I, I have to back that up. I do see,

frequently find myself painting miniatures with a pair of reading glasses and my magnification loops so i i have essentially uh done this a time or two so maybe that's what's up because as we learn like his passion is reading various texts reading books in their original language so who knows sometimes maybe he has to really bust up the the optics in order to handle certain font sizes

Yeah. So when, when Boyd gets in, he's like trying to frustratedly pry into a walnut with a knife and this is unsuccessful. So he's telling Boyd about what you were talking about, how he fights the boredom of the outpost by reading these old texts in the original languages. And then he goes and gets this giant leather bound book from the shelf and uses it to smash his walnuts open. I wonder if there's a kind of implied joke here that like,

He tells himself the way he fights the frontier boredom is through reading these ancient tomes, but really the way he fights the boredom is through eating. Yeah, yeah, possibly. There's a strong time enough at last vibe to this character. Like everyone here, he's an outcast, but he's found the place where he can mostly just sit around and read.

Hart asks Boyd if he has a hobby, and Boyd says swimming. Probably not much opportunity for swimming here in the mountains. Hart explains a bit about the history of the fort. It was originally a Spanish mission. Now it serves as a way station for travelers moving through the Sierra Nevadas. And he says, of course, there are very few travelers in the winter, so the fort only has minimal staff for the season. And then we get a brief introduction to each of them. There's Private Toffler, who is very religious. This is Jeremy Davies.

We see him praying before meals and like heaving wooden crosses up to the sky. He's also in many scenes trying to compose a hymn. You can see him working on the melody and the lyrics.

It's not coming together. Yeah. We see Major Knox, played by Steven Spinella, who likes to drink. That's his main character trait. He likes the whiskey bottle. He used to be a veterinarian, so he is the fort's medic. We see Private Reich, played by Neil McDonough, who is the tough guy. And there's this brief flash of him standing naked up to the waist in a mountain stream surrounded by snow, and he's just screaming and flexing his muscles. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. This is some troubled masculinity here. I am hard man. Yeah. And then, of course, there's George, played by Joseph Running Fox, who is Martha's brother. He's a Washoe scout. And then there is Private Cleaves, played by David Arquette. Hart calls him the over-medicated Private Cleaves. He likes drugs and he's the cook.

We get a short little dinner scene with everyone assembled. The vibes are pretty cursed, especially since Cleaves is like seized with crazy laughter at apparently nothing the whole time.

And then we get some more of Boyd's backstory. We like flashback to what happened during the war and we learn the truth. The truth was Boyd was in the middle of battle and he became so terrified that he froze and he just laid down on the field and pretended to be dead while his men were slaughtered all around him.

And then after the battle was over, the enemy came and collected the bodies from the field and put them in a cart. Boyd was at the bottom of the cart with the blood of his commanding officer running down his face and into his mouth.

Then, he says, after this, he had a change of heart. Something came over him while he was lying at the bottom of that cart, and he regained his courage, and he sprung from the pile of bodies, and he single-handedly captured the enemy command, and this was the act that won him his commendation for heroism. But when General Slauson found out that this whole thing started with the dreadful act of cowardice, you know, playing dead on the battlefield, he decided to punish Boyd by sending him out here to California. Mm-hmm.

So back in the present, it is wintertime, snow is falling and heart sins, cleaves and Martha out on a journey to the nearest trading post to get the stuff you need, salt, pork and flour and all that.

And it's going to be a three day journey. So it's only the rest of the crew there left at the fort. And while they're gone, we see Hart and Boyd bonding, sharing some bourbon. There's an interesting little moment where Hart talks about how he wanted to escape the world by coming here. But now he wants to escape this place. Quote, frightening thing about escape is the chance you might end up someplace worse.

I don't know if this is one of the major themes of the movie. I have to think about it, but it is a little interesting in the context of the story that

the observation that we can be deceived into thinking that everything would be better if we could just change some particular set of external circumstances, like where we are, what our job is, what we're doing or something like that. But that sometimes, you know, maybe sometimes that is really the problem. But a lot of times it's not. Sometimes you manage that change and discover that wasn't actually the problem. And and your new circumstance is not actually the solution. The new circumstance is something you once again desire to escape. Yeah.

Yeah, I think that idea does weave itself rather nicely through many aspects of the plot. But this moment is suddenly interrupted by a boo scare. Outside through a frosted window, Boyd sees a figure in black looking in at them from the cold. So the soldiers run outside and they find a man collapsed in the snow, apparently dying of hypothermia. And they bring him inside and they're able to warm him up and save his life.

The next day, the man wakes up and he looks to me surprisingly healthy. He introduces himself as F.W. Colquhoun, servant of God. And he's, I don't know, like you get a look at him and like he looks like pretty well fed. Like he looks like he's doing great. It's worth noting here that both Colquhoun and Boyd

they both kind of look like Jesus, uh, you know, both shaggy long hair and either a beard or a goatee. Yeah. So Colquhoun explains that he had been stuck in the mountains for three months before he found the fort, uh, three months without food and heart is incredulous at this, but Colquhoun clarifies, he says, uh,

I said three months without food, not three months with nothing to eat. Yeah. And he's going to explain, but you also get the idea here that that's all he really needed to say. Like, everyone knows what he means by that. Everyone's familiar with the idea of survival cannibalism.

So here Colquhoun launches into his backstory and he gives a whole monologue. I'm not going to quote the entire thing here, but basically he tells a story of how he was part of a traveling party with five other people. And there was a guide they had, a military man named Colonel Ives.

who he calls a detestable man, a disastrous guide, who professed to know a new, shorter route through the Sierra Nevada mountains. But in fact, it turns out they took the route and then they got stuck in a snowstorm in the winter and they were stuck in a cave and they couldn't get out.

This, of course, mirrors real incidents in history like the quote shortcut that was taken by the members of the Donner Party. This was a path that others had taken in the past, but basically the Donner Party, when they took a different path through the Sierra Nevadas, got delayed and then got stuck up in the mountains in the winter. Hmm.

So he describes them getting stuck in this cave, and then Colquhoun says, quote, We had run out of food. We ate the oxen, all of the horses, even my own dog, and that lasted us about a month. After that, we turned to our belts, shoes, any roots we could dig up, but you know there's no real nourishment in those. We remained famished.

The day that Jones died, I was out collecting wood. He had expired from malnourishment, and when I returned, the others were cooking his legs for dinner. Would I have stopped it had I been there? I don't know. But I must say, when I stepped inside that cave, the smell of meat cooking, I thanked the Lord. I thanked the Lord. And then things got out of hand. Ha ha ha!

And he goes on to describe how he only ate the meat from the people who had died naturally and he ate sparingly, but the others, something changed in them. Something came over them and they had to eat, especially Ives.

Ives became insane and he just kept killing other people from the cave so he could eat them. And at last, Colquhoun says that his courage failed him and he fled the cave and he wandered out and eventually came across this fort.

But the way the story trails off, it is alleged here that Colonel Ives is still alive up in the cave with at least one other person, innocent person stuck up there with him, a woman named McCready. Is she still alive? As far as Colquhoun knows, possibly she is. So Hart decides, based on the story, that they immediately have to send out a rescue party.

Yeah, nobody really wants to go. But Hart is, you know, he's dedicated to what is right here. And he says, it's our job. It's our job. We have to do it. There's no choice.

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But listening is just the beginning because you can stay in the moment while your phone stays in your pocket as Meta AI provides answers to questions on the fly. Hey Meta, what's the weather tonight? Tonight will be clear with temperatures ranging from... Capture and share moments. Hey Meta, post this video on Instagram. You can even get Meta AI to make recommendations based on what you're looking at.

Hey Meta, what can I make for dinner with what's in the fridge? You can make a delicious spinach and chicken salad or add the baby spinach to pasta with some garlic shrimp. Cool. Ray-Ban Meta Glasses. Choose from a variety of classic Ray-Ban frames, all with Meta AI at meta.com slash AI dash glasses. And don't forget to say, hey Meta, play iHeart Radio to enjoy your favorite radio stations, artists, and podcasts on the iHeart app.

Say you've always wanted to have a backyard oasis. Well, here's the thing. If you get smart with your money, you can do things like that. With Empower, you can start making the most out of your money so you can go out and live a little. Isn't that why we work so hard? To have some fun with our money. Like treating yourself to something special or spontaneously doing something extra for a loved one. With Empower, you can get the help you need with your money and investing questions to feel confident about not only taking care of yourself,

Today's episode is brought to you by USPS.

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So everybody's getting ready to leave, but George comes up to Hart and Boyd and stops them to warn them about something. And it's based on Colquhoun's story. What he wants to warn them about is the Wendigo being spoken of by some of the people of the North. In reality, I believe the Wendigo legend comes from Algonquin folklore, which would have been further North and East. Mm-hmm.

But here George explains and Hart translates for Boyd. The gist of it is a man eats another's flesh, usually the flesh of an enemy. And in doing so, he steals the man's strength, his essence, his spirit. His hunger becomes insatiable. The more he eats, the more he wants to. And the more he eats, the stronger he becomes.

And Hart is like, George, people don't still do that, do they? And George responds by telling him that white man eats the body of Jesus Christ every Sunday. Yeah, and he flips the hide that he's been reading this off of, and it has Christian iconography on the other side. Yeah, it's a nice moment.

So the party sets out on the rescue mission. The party is Hart, Boyd, Reich, Toffler, George, and the stranger, Colquhoun. They pack up provisions, they bundle up, and they head into the mountains. And so we get a little montage of their journey. I like one little moment on the journey where Colquhoun helps Toffler find a rhyme when he's composing his hymn. Like he says, he ends a line with the word servant and he's going like, lervant servant.

And Colquhoun is like fervent. And Toffler is very, very helped by this. He's appreciative.

But anyway, they are making their way along through the mountains. And at one point they stop in this high mountain pass in the snow. And Boyd kind of questions Colquhoun. He's clearly, he's curious. He says, when you ate the flesh of the man afterwards, you said your hunger was different, more wanton. Did you feel physically different, stronger? And Colquhoun kind of mildly says, I seem to recall something like that, feeling some kind of virility.

He's being very reticent about it now, but this will become funnier in retrospect. Also, I just have to comment on everybody's 19th century sunglasses here. Yeah.

They've all got these shaded goggles of various kinds that look like, I don't know, they look like Vin Diesel in pitch black. Yeah, Robert Carlyle here reminds me a little bit of Kurt Russell in The Thing, actually, with the sunglasses and to a certain extent with the hat. He does not have the full hat situation going on, but still. So somewhere in here, Toffler falls down and gets injured. And so he's got like a bloody wound that they have to bandage up.

And later that night after Toffler's injury, everybody's asleep in their tent when suddenly Toffler comes awake and he starts screaming and it's dark and you can't see what's happening. But then somebody lights a lamp and Toffler is backed up against one side of the tent, terrified. And on the other side of the tent is Colquhoun looking pale and kind of crazed with blood on his lips. And Toffler says, he was licking me. Yeah.

And this is interesting because Rob, if you know what I mean, Robert Carlyle plays Colquhoun very, very,

straightforwardly before this like there's nothing to indicate really that they would should have any concern about him he seems like a a wronged victimized a man who is frightened and in search of justice like there's nothing about him that reads as abnormal but that starts falling apart on this journey and

Uh, so Colquhoun pleads with heart on the others. He's apologizing. He says he was having a nightmare. Uh, and then he woke up to find himself crouched over Toffler licking the wound. And then he asks them to restrain him for the rest of the journey. So they do, they, they tie his hands. And then, uh, the next day they come to the cave, the cave where there should be Ives and Mrs. McCready.

And I still have strong memories of how freaky this scene was the first time I saw it. Such a

powerful sense of unease and menace and things just steadily becoming weirder and more chaotic by the moment yeah yeah the the editing is superb here the music is incredible building that tension we get these kind of like rumbling rhythmic beats like there's some primal force welling up through the whole situation

Yeah, exactly. And so as they approached the cave, Colquhoun, who had been, again, he was fairly composed and sympathetic at first. I mean, frightened, but that's all. He starts acting increasingly erratic, not just afraid, but like quaking and moving his body in bizarre ways and making these weird little like yipping and whimpering noises. Again, at first, like he's

but then just more and more weird, like some kind of trapped Wolverine that's tipping from fear into a kind of threatening playfulness. And so Reich and Boyd go into the cave to investigate and everybody else waits outside. And in this scene, Reich makes his contempt for Boyd clear while they're searching. Like obviously he, he views Boyd as gutless and unworthy of command and,

And inside the cave, they find some kind of pit, like a natural oubliette. And they go down and investigate this. And what they find inside is too many skeletons. Too many skeletons to match Colquhoun's story. And the piles of clothes inside include a military uniform.

So if the Colonel Ives of the story was not the eater and was instead eaten, who was the eater? And then the guys inside the cave are like, oh no. And they scream, it's a trap.

And this whole cave, to drive this home, this is like a wonderful cannibal cavern situation. We're right out of an episode of Tales from the Crypt. Disgusting. Yeah, the skeletons all have this kind of melted fat-looking thing over them. They're kind of waxy. It's really gross. So Boyd and Reich rush back outside, but Colquhoun is already on the attack.

He first, he starts frantically digging in the dirt outside the cave and he digs up a knife. He attacks and stabs heart. A heart lays on the ground dying. He shoots George and then he chases Toffler out into the woods. And this is where I was saying Colquhoun, he gets into full like late sequel, Freddy Krueger mode. He is having fun. Like he tries to shoot Toffler, but the gun jams and he goes, that is so annoying. And he's like,

And then he's like playing with him. He's brandishing the knife at him and kind of dancing. And he says, run, run. So the chase breaks out and interesting music choices here. Once again, the music at first in this chase is not like a threatening dissonant jabs. It's not minor key chase music. It's a hoedown. It's like a lively, upbeat, major key fiddle and banjo music. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, you don't expect it to go this direction, but looking at it, this was the obvious choice. It breaks the tension, and we get to go in a different direction here.

So Boyd and Reich run after them. Again, even though Boyd is the officer and Reich is the private, Reich is giving all the orders and Boyd is lagging behind, barely complying. They find Toffler's body disemboweled. Colquhoun is a bit like Jason Voorhees here, seemingly disappearing and reappearing through the woods, kind of an arcane trickster. At one point here, Boyd tries to chicken out. He's like, I'm going back. I've got to go back. But Reich kind of bullies him into staying there.

Uh, Reich is killed by Colquhoun with a knife to the chest and he falls off a cliff. Uh, Boyd panics and then to escape Colquhoun, he jumps off the cliff. Uh, he survives the fall, but he like falls into a bunch of trees, breaks his leg and then tumbles along with Reich's body into a hidden pit in the earth covered by pine branches. Uh, and then he falls down in there along with Reich's body and time begins to pass. So, uh,

We get a little montage showing kind of, I don't know, maybe days going by. And we see Colquhoun transformed into a free-roaming master of the wilderness now. He's just sitting on a shoal of pebbles in the middle of a river, eating lustily from a big joint of human meat. And then later he's skipping rocks in the stream with this shirt covered in blood and blood all in his beard. Yeah, just loving life at this point.

Back in the pit, Boyd sets his bone. Yeah. So warning folks, there is a self bone setting scene in the film. And it seems like he's clearly done for unless he could get some nourishment. And there's Reich right there.

and i love right how reich's body is presented here reich has like just wide open dead eyes like just continuing to judge him for his coward cowardice these horrible cloudy eyes but this horrible huge grin this dead rictus um and he's covered in dried like blackened blood yeah and it's interesting to see how boyd works his way up to it like it starts with him taking reich's coat off his body because he's cold he's like can i borrow this you don't need it and

And then he's like, well, I already took the coat and he gets the knife and it's mostly implied what he does next. But sometime later we see Boyd emerge from the pit somehow healed. Um, like he's good and he's, he's all right enough to walk and he makes the track back to the fort.

When he arrives, he's received and taken in by Martha and Cleaves, who have returned from their trip, and Knox, who was passed out drunk the whole time there while everybody else was doing the things in the previous scenes. So there's a scene here where Boyd goes to Martha. Now he's clearly turned on to the idea of the Wendigo, and he goes to her to ask if she knows anything about it. Can it be stopped?

She gives a different kind of answer than he was expecting. She says the Wendigo always takes, never gives. And to stop the Wendigo, she says, you must give yourself. You have to die.

Implicit in this is that she understands Boyd to be part of the Wendigo. And the only way to truly beat it is to admit that you are part of it, forsake your hunger and die. Yeah. And Boyd doesn't say, I'm asking for a friend. Yeah. He doesn't try to cover it up. Yeah.

So as time goes on, General Slauson and his entourage arrive at the fort. They hear Boyd's story and they investigate the cave, but they find nothing there. No bodies, no bones. There's not a scrap of evidence to back up the story Boyd has told. And Slauson tries to get Boyd to amend his statement, but he won't.

Anyway, General Slauson has brought in a new commanding officer to serve as a replacement for Hart. It's a colonel. So step into the room, Colonel. Let's see your new Captain Boyd here. And it is a colonel named Ives. Uh-oh. It's him. It's Colquhoun. He's all cleaned up now. He's in uniform. And it turns out Colquhoun is Ives.

Yeah, gone is the prospector's beard and the crazy eyes. Now we have this steely calm that is over him. He looks very professional. He is establishment cannibalism at this point. Yes. So Boyd immediately, he freaks out and he tries to tell everyone, but the story doesn't check out. Because in his story, he got a shot off on Colquhoun. He shot him in the shoulder. So they're like, okay, well, if your story's true, he would have a scar. So they look...

on Ives' body and there are no scars. They find nothing, just like well-fed, unblemished skin.

Yeah. So Boyd's stock here continues to go down in the general's view here. That's right. So everybody settles in with the new colonel. There's like a dinner scene where they're all having ribs, except Cleaves discovers that neither Colonel Ives nor Boyd will eat meat. Ives never eats meat at all since he can't forget it used to be an animal. And Boyd says he will only eat meat as a last resort. Yeah.

There's a later scene where Boyd is looking out the window at Cleaves as he's setting up some kind of sculpture, like a big cow skeleton thing. And Boyd fantasizes about killing him and eating his organs. But then Boyd kind of snaps out of it. It's like, what's going on with me? Why can't I stop thinking about eating people? Yeah, it's kind of like it's kind of a version of the Looney Tunes scene where, you know, one character looks at another and they just just see a giant turkey leg. Yeah, yeah.

So later there's one night alone. Boyd is like he's paranoid. He's sitting outside clutching a big kitchen knife and with a blanket around him. And Ives comes out. He's very suave and dapper and he's smoking a cigarillo out in the cold. And Ives breaks the tension by essentially now admitting it because they're alone. He says to Boyd, I found your private Reich up there or what was left of him.

You didn't finish. I can't blame you. He was tough, but then a good soldier ought to be. And then he takes a big drag out of his smoke and

And he says, you know, not too long ago, I couldn't do that. Could barely take a breath without coughing up a pint of blood. Tuberculosis. That, along with fierce headaches, depression, suicidal ambition. I was in pretty horrible shape. In fact, I was on my way to a sanatorium to convalesce or more likely die. When en route, this Indian scout told me a curious story. Man eats the flesh of another.

He takes the other man's strength, absorbs his spirit. Well, naturally, I just had to try it. Consequently, I ate the scout first, and you know what? He was absolutely right. I grew stronger.

And then he launches into telling the wagon train story. It's sort of a different version of the story he told at the beginning. But now he is Colonel Ives. He manages to get people stuck in the mountains so he can eat them. He says he ate five men in three months. And he says, tuberculosis vanished, as did the headaches and the black thoughts. I returned that spring happy and healthy and virile. And here Ives says,

shifts he shifts to kind of tempting to being the Satan figure tempting Boyd he's like you know what I'm talking about you've done it too you know it's power so why are you resisting and Boyd says what's wrong it's wrong to eat people but Ives mocks him he says morality is the last bastion of a coward it's like a man says he cannot do something because it would be wrong the real reason is because he's afraid and

And then he keeps tempting him. Like, he gets a cut on his hand, and he's like, sniff my blood. It's a great sequence. This and a subsequent sequence, we're going to get a subsequent temptation sequence between Ives and Boyd. Just tremendous here, especially from Carlyle. Just great acting. Love the way the scenes are put together. Tremendous. Fantastic, yeah. And Boyd here tries to attack Ives, but they're interrupted by Martha and then by Knox. Yeah.

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So the next day, Martha volunteers to make the journey by foot to San Miguel to get General Slauson for, you know, I guess to come back and investigate crimes once again. So that just leaves Knox, Boyd and Ives at the fort.

So Boyd is under arrest and there's this scene where Ives is cooking a stew and Knox is like, can I help? And Ives is like, not right now. Perhaps later you can contribute. Yes, yes. So we get a little bit of the comedy here, but they underscore it. It's nice.

Yeah. And Boyd, listen, so in this scene, there are things happening in the other room and it becomes apparent that somebody in the other room has killed Knox with his own sword. But then when the door swings open, it's not Ives standing there.

It's Colonel Hart. Yep. He smiles and he says, hello, Boyd. Oh, and he's covered with blood now. He doesn't have any of his glasses on. There's a new energy to this man. It's clear that he has engaged in the cannibalism. That's right. So he tells the story of how he thought he was dying, but he found himself being nursed back to health in the cave by Ives. And he was healed from his mortal wound because he ate man flesh.

He says, by the time I regained my senses, there was no turning back. I feel terrific. So now Hart and Ives are part of a cannibal conspiracy and Hart makes a pitch. Boyd should join them.

Yeah. And this is where we get like this, this, this other temptation scene that is just excellent. This is where the, we get an another just tremendous monologue from, uh, from Carlisle and it really kind of drives home. I think the central thesis of the whole picture.

Yeah. So Boyd is taken out to where Ives is. I think they're grilling outside maybe now, or they grilling parts of Knox, butchering him. I think, I don't know. They're, they're doing some kind of cannibalism stuff outside and Ives looks at the mountains and he says, manifest destiny, westward expansion, you know, come April, it'll all start again. Thousands of gold hungry Americans will travel over those mountains on their way to new lives passing right through here.

We won't kill indiscriminately. No, selectively. Good God, we don't want to break up families. And then, oh yeah, horrible. And then he talks about how they want to recruit somebody else, General Slauson. They want to convert him to the religion of cannibalism.

Because it would be useful to have somebody that powerful, right? He says, we don't wish to recruit everyone. We've got enough mouths to feed as it is. We just need a home. And this country is seeking to be whole, stretching out its arms, consuming all it can. We merely follow. Ooh, and that line there just gives me chills.

So Boyd tries to resist them. He says he's not going to be like them, but the bids continue. Carlisle says, you're already one of us almost. You hunger for it. You just won't resign yourself to it.

Oh, yeah. And we get that other line that's always stuck with me. It's not courage to resist me, Boyd. It's courage to accept me. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. But this makes me think, like, when are you really part of a conspiracy? Like when you do the crime or when you accept that doing the crime is all right? Yeah. Yeah. And there's a lot to chew on here, cannibal fans.

Puns aside. But yeah, it's like this idea that like there is this gravity that is pulling all of them down and there is inevitability to it. And like, Boyd, you're not doing yourself any favors by fighting against the tide. You'd make things so much easier for yourself and for everyone around you if you just gave in, if you just accepted the world as it is, the world as we've made it.

If you just accept that you're a part of it. And that, of course, has been part of Boyd's moral failing thus far. He's just proceeded through life like a thing encased in mud or almost fossilized in his environment.

And has just been generally just unwilling and unable to attempt to counteract that flow. Yeah. He is acted upon. He does not act against. Yeah. Yeah. Though he is trying to resist here. And it's interesting the way that Carlisle, the way that Ives is...

like papering over distinctions. Like he's like, you, you've already done the same as us, but Boyd hasn't unlike them. He has not killed to eat man flesh. He's just eaten of those who already died. But I think they're trying to make that transition for him easier. It's like not observing the distinction. Yeah.

So then Ives tries to persuade Boyd by stabbing him. So he stabs him. He's like, all right, now you know the rules. You've either got to eat human or die from your wound. So Ives and Hart like sit around the table enjoying a major knock stew. And at first Boyd resists, but then the pain of his wound becomes too great and his fear of death overwhelms him and he begins to eat. Yeah.

I like how the answer here is for him to give in and eat the stew, too, which is like the completely civilized version of the cannibal feast, which I don't think we've had up until this point. It's just been more like bone-gnawing. But here is the sanitized version of it, which I think is also rife with so many different interpretations when you start analyzing this picture. Like, here, here's the refined version of the thing you're afraid of. Give into it. Become a part of this operation. Yeah. Yeah.

Uh, so the next day, of course, Boyd is all healed up. The cannibalism does wonders. And there is a conversation between Boyd and Hart while, while Ives is outside. Hart talks about how he misses his books that were taken off his shelf, I guess, when he was presumed dead. And he muses about how even thousands of years ago, Plato and Aristotle were thinking over the same problems that they can't solve today. Like, uh, what is happiness and how to get it?

And Boyd says Aristotle wanted to get to truth, not happiness. And Hart kind of rebels against this. He says, I spent my whole life trying to do what I thought was right and true. And now here I am.

But some cracks appear in Hart's conviction. Boyd reminds him of all the people they killed, Cleaves, Knox, and Hart kind of, he fights his conscience off. He's screaming about how you have to kill to live. But Boyd eventually gets through to him and Hart kind of collapses and decides, you're right. I don't want to go on living like this. Boyd, you've just got to kill me. And Boyd does. This scene here, which is intercut with a few things concerning Boyd,

Calhoun or Ives and other characters. But this scene, I think, is pretty admirable because a lot has to happen, particularly with Hart's character, in a very short amount of time. And I think in...

if it was done even slightly incorrectly, it would have felt really rushed. As it is here, like, it feels, ultimately feels, you know, a bit on fast forward, but also completely earned. And I think it comes down to the direction, to the performances, and just the way they've cut it all together. Like, I end up completely buying it, but man, they do so much in such a short scene. Well, I mean, I think because it comes across that Hart was also just kind of weak-willed, and he was allowing others

Ives confidence in the cannibalism conspiracy to, to sort of, uh, allow him not to consult his own soul, uh, about whether this was right. He was just like going along with the justifications that Ives gave. But now that somebody else from the outside is pressuring him, it kind of does break through the facade and the real heart comes out and his guilt and grief, uh, are, are unleashed and he can't deal with it. Right. Yeah.

And so now the line is clearly drawn. Ives sees this happen through the blood splattered window. And so now it's going to be it's going to be a standoff between Boyd and Ives. Right. So the rest of the movie is basically this grueling fight, this duel between Boyd and Ives. They sword fight, they slash, stab, bash across the landscape of the fort.

And then they end up at the end of this fight in a bear trap together, which is just perfect. Yeah, it's an enormous bear trap. Like I'm almost like acne level of bear trap, but it feels earned and it's a surprise. I think they they do. We do see a bear trap earlier in the picture, so it is established. But when it goes off, yeah, just get some both.

I've says, uh, says to Guy Pearce, if you die first, I am definitely going to eat you. But if I die first, what will you do?

Good question, because we actually don't know at this point. Boyd's character has been portrayed as weak-willed enough and the story is bleak enough that you could believe it would end with him just embracing the cannibalism, eating him and becoming Wendigo again. Yeah, because thus far, that's how he has proceeded.

Those are the choices which brought him to this moment. But Boyd does have a moral victory in the end by resisting the temptation. Ives does die first and Boyd does not chow down. He dies as well.

But then General Slauson arrives with his retinue, and they wander in, they're looking around, and he finds a stew bubbling over the fire. I guess this is still the Nock stew, still left over from the day before. And he decides to taste it, and he tastes it, and he's like, mmm, delicious, yummy, yummy. Yeah, so it seems like maybe the cycle will continue with General Slauson. And then we see Martha show up, and Martha finds the bodies of Boyd and Ives in the bear trap. Yeah.

And she just, she sees what's happened and she runs off into the wilderness.

Yeah. Thinking about the Slauson question, like if he eats the stew, does he become the Wendigo within the logic of the movie? Are you a Wendigo? If you don't know that you're eating human, I think that's a, that's a real question. Like it comes back to one of the questions that we raised earlier. Like does the monstrosity arise from eating human flesh physically? Is it the physical processing of it with your digestive system? Even if you don't know what it is, um,

Or is it the conscious awareness that you are eating human flesh? Or is it the moral acceptance of yourself as one who eats human flesh? So the distinction between those last two being like being aware that you're eating human flesh but not feeling okay about it versus feeling like, all right, it's okay that I'm doing this versus the final thing is killing, the act of killing someone in order to get more human flesh. Yeah.

They're all like different points on a continuum. And I guess you could ask at what point does one become the monster and does each step kind of lead to the next step?

That's a great question. Yeah, the movie leaves it ambiguous. Like we can, I think, reasonably think that, okay, if Slauson is going to eat this stuff, it tastes great. He's probably going to just really pig out on it and maybe have like a really great week. He's going to take up new hobbies. He's going to get a lot done at work. But will he be able to make the connection? Yeah.

And maybe he will. Maybe there's enough essentially forensic evidence at the camp that he'll realize what he ate and then start making increasingly horrific choices. But maybe not. But then also it does kind of tie into some of the questions raised, like what happens when you come along and you eat this stew and you don't know how the stew was made. It's just presented to you. And now what are you for having participated in this meal?

All right. Well, that's ravenous. Yeah. Yeah. I think it really holds up. I think it's a great, great film. It really stands. I have a hard to think of another film from 1999 that really that I keep coming back to. But this is this is the one. I mean, it's not it's not end of days. It's not Blair Witch Product. Blair Witch Project. That should have been the sequel. Blair Witch Product.

My memory is actually that Blair Witch Project is pretty good. I think it might hold up pretty well. I think with that one, it really impressed me at the time, but then we saw so much found footage material that I've just been so resistant to going back and watching anything from that year. I don't know. I look at a list of other 1999 films. That was the year we had Audition. I'm in no hurry to rewatch that, but that was pretty strong as well.

That remake of The Haunting with Liam Neeson and Catherine Zeta-Jones. How about that? It's not on the list to rewatch anytime soon.

All right. Does that do it for today? Yeah, we're going to go and close it up here, but we'd love to hear from everyone out there. What are your thoughts on ravenous or other cannibal films or other films from 1999? It's all fair game. Write in, let us know. We would love to hear from you. You can get this show wherever you get your podcasts, get it either in the stuff to blow your mind podcast feed where it publishes every Friday or on its own and its own standalone playlist, which you can currently get wherever you get your podcasts as well, wherever you get weird house cinema, wherever you get your podcasts.

rate and review that really helps us out if you are on letterbox.com look us up our username there is weird house and we have a big old list of all the movies we've watched over the years and sometimes we get a peek ahead at what's next huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer jj posway if you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other to suggest a topic for the future or just to say hello you can email us at contact at stuff to blow your mind dot com

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