Ravenous
Hey, it's a reader request! My friend Fabian asked me to do this one at some point this month and since I loved Bone Tomahawk yesterday it seemed like the right time to revisit another Civil War-era cannibal movie featuring David Arquette in a small role (which is turning out to be a surprisingly robust subgenre). This one is a lot goofier, but it's also buckets of fun.
Guy Pearce, who should be in everything, stars as a US soldier during the Mexican-American War who is stationed in a remote California outpost when a disheveled man (Robert Carlyle) appears at the base with wild tales of cannibalistic survival. Turns out that there's more to his tale than Pearce and the other members of his regiment (including Jeffrey Jones, Neal McDonough, and Jeremy Davies) realize, and things go next-level bonkers (™ Jason Mantzoukas) from there.
Where the cannibal threat in Bone Tomahawk was deadly serious, here it's a lot sillier. It's stated at one point that to consume the flesh of another gives you that person's life energy, which basically turns this into Highlander with moderately less goofy accents as people are absorbing each other's energies all willy-nilly. It's a lot of silly fun, with Antonia Bird's energetic direction and Damon Albarn & Michael Nyman's quirky score helping it stand out from the crowd. The tone is kept light despite the subject matter and setting, and that comic tone (along with a bunch of fun performances, Carlyle in particular has maybe never been better) keeps the material from ever getting downbeat. This is one of the best comic horror movies of the 90s, and while it tanked in theaters it's easy to see why its cult has grown on home video and it has such a strong reputation in the horror community. It's on a special-feature-packed blu-ray from Scream Factory (doing the Lord's work, as usual) and absolutely worth tracking down. Just don't watch it when you're hungry.
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