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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2V-KLn_PgQg Hey, so this is an essay I wrote for the Box Office Disasters project CloseFriend spearheaded a while back. Unfortunately that project never got off the ground, but some people expressed some interest in this essay and I got nothing better to do with it, so here it is. I'm giving it it's own thread in the hopes that we can get some people talkin' 'bout this great, underseen movie. The Unpalatable Nature of Antonia Bird's Ravenous 1999 is looked back on by many film fans as a real banner year for cinema. Whether it was American Beauty and The Sixth Sense becoming instant critical and commercial darlings and putting the names Mendes and Shyamalan on the map, Fight Club insinuating itself into the cult-film canon, The Blair Witch Project kickstarting the found-footage genre or The Matrix and Star Wars: Episode I redefining the hype-driven summer blockbuster, it was a year of movies that made big splashes, the ripple effects of which are still visible in the movies hitting screens over a decade later. One movie you're conspicuously unlikely to see mentioned alongside the Class of '99 is Ravenous, a grubby little period piece of a horror movie dealing with that most grotesque and taboo of crimes, cannibalism. And if Fight Club is the kind of cult film that inspires dorm-room posters and knowing quotations, Ravenous is the truer form of cult film, the kind unknown to all but a small subset of nerdily devoted cinephiles. Making back less than one-fifth of its 12 million dollar budget and garnering a reaction of largely befuddled hostility from most critics, Ravenous zipped in-and-out of theaters almost without notice. Which is hugely unfair, because it's a sterling horror film possessed of a truly wonderful streak of black comedy, certainly one of the best and smartest horror movies of the 1990s and one of the most interesting and intellectually curious movies to deal with people who eat people. Which is not to say it isn't a bit alienating, and the film gets into that right away in its bravura opening sequence. We begin with an oddly queasy brass and string section over the military commendation of our protagonist, Captain Boyd (Guy Pearce), for his brave capture of an enemy outpost in the Mexican-American war. Almost immediately, his bravery is revealed not to be what it appears, through flashbacks to a terrified Boyd playing dead to avoid being slaughtered with the rest of his company, only gaining any courage after having his prostrate body wheeled behind enemy lines and inadvertently drinking the blood of his dead companions. Back in the present, we cut to Boyd's fellow soldiers really chowing down on some extra-rare steak in a montage cut to make the mere act of eating look as revolting as possible, complete with some wonderfully grotesque sound work, heightening both the disgusting noises of Boyd's comrades and his own panicked breathing. Boyd is overwhelmed and runs out of the dining hall to be sick, and there we get the title card, crash landing over a full-screen image of our protagonist's vomit-streaked face.  Our mumbling weakling of a protagonist. I'm going to pause my synopsis since this seems like a good time to mention it: Captain Boyd is an immensely weird and hard-to-like protagonist. We're introduced to him looking like total poo poo, sun-chapped and sickly, being honored for an act of the worst kind of cowardice in a classic example of military hypocrisy. It'll be another five minutes in before he says a single word, and nearly half an hour before he utters anything close to a complete sentence. So we can already see how asking audiences to identify with this guy might've been a hard sell.  "You gonna finish that?" Anyway, Boyd's superior officer General Slauson (John Spencer) sees right through him and sends him to the forgotten, ramshackle weigh station Fort Spencer, more or less to get rid of him. Fort Spencer's inhabitants are a motley crew made up of the terminally bored Colonel Hart (Jeffrey Jones), the permanently drunk Major Knox (Stephen Spinella), simple-minded missionary Private Toffler (Jeremy Davies), ultra-macho soldier Private Reich (Neal McDonagh), perpetually stoned cook Private Cleaves (David Arquette), and Native Americans Martha and George who “more or less came with the place” (Sheila Tousey & Joseph Running Fox). Boyd is just starting to settle into his new life of deadening tedium when it's interrupted by an emaciated and quite addled traveler named Colqhoun (Robert Carlyle), who stumbles upon the fort and tells its inhabitants a most disturbing story: his wagon train got lost in the mountains during a heavy snowstorm, and when food ran short, they were forced to eat their dead to survive. The expedition's leader, one Colonel Ives, got a bit too enthusiastic in his taste for human flesh, and Colqhoun fled, leaving an innocent woman in Ives' clutches. Despite George's fear that they could be up against a Wendigo, a kind of vampiric cannibal who gains the strength of those he devours, Hart insists on leading a rescue party back to the cave. And it's here that I will urge the reader, if I have done my job and gotten you interested in this movie at all, to go out and watch it if you haven't, because we'll be wading into spoiler territory from this point forward.  Yum yum. For you see, once the group arrives at the cave, they quickly discover that Colqhoun, who has been acting battier and battier as their mission continues, is none other than Colonel Ives, and upon luring them back to his lair, he makes very short work of all of them save Boyd, who makes a death-defying leap off a cliff rather than face the cannibal. In an ironic twist, Boyd, his leg shattered, is forced again to cannibalize a dead comrade to survive, in a scene with shades of All Quiet on The Western Front. When the healed Boyd makes it back to Fort Spencer, General Slauson unsurprisingly refuses to listen to Ives' wild stories, and insists that Boyd start towing the line and following the orders of the fort's new commander... one Colonel Ives.  Coming home. At the risk of making an atrocious pun, Ravenous is a film that gives you a lot to chew on. Let's start with the very subject of cannibalism, always an intensely icky subject matter even within the already icky horror genre. If we take it that all acts of murder are about dehumanization and robbing one of their personhood, cannibalism is that impulse taken to its logical and horrifying extreme; not content with simply taking someone's life, the cannibal takes quite literally everything a person has. A corpse may be depersonalized, but a flesh-stripped skeleton is abstracted even further from a living human being – let alone the grisly collection of unidentifiable bones the rescue party finds in Ives' cave. The film takes this a couple steps further, juxtaposing cannibalism with westward expansion in some viciously probing ways (this is made very explicit in a late speech by Ives, although one of my favorite little details is an earlier bit of dialogue where he explains how, upon being told the legend of the Wendigo by a native scout, he promptly ate the native). The satire of the idea of American superiority even extends to the color balance; many compositions in this movie are made up almost entirely of reds, whites and blues, but almost always in their most desaturated, sickly shades.  Patriotism, Ravenous style. On a more surface level are the movie's many technical accomplishments. I've already mentioned that opening scene, which is a mini masterpiece of editing and sound mixing. In addition, though it often wallows in ugliness, this is an astonishingly pretty film. Cinematographer Anthony B. Richmond (who shot Don't Look Now and The Man Who Fell to Earth for Nicholas Roeg, so you know he's bonafide) does a wonderful job with the landscapes of the American southwest (here played by Mexico and Slovakia), as well as bringing out the creepiness in the fire-lit interiors and exploiting all of the film's many disquieting shades of red to maximum effect. The cast is also quite the outstanding collection of character actors, anchored by Guy Pearce's reactive, animalistic portrayal of Boyd – in the early going especially, he captures all the internalized hurt of a kicked dog (he'd take a similar tack six years later to much more menacing effect in John Hillcoat's magnificent The Proposition). Pearce is given a great counterpoint in Robert Carlyle's emotive, scenery-chewing turn as Colqhoun/Ives, appropriately panic-stricken and traumatized in his spectacular early monologue, and then gradually revealing hints of creepiness until finally transforming into a full-fledged Freddy Krueger-esque quipping horror villain, delivering the film's best bits of darkly comedic dialogue with élan. I'd like to also extend a mention to one of my favorite 'that guy' actors, Jeffrey Jones, who is given quite the interesting character arc to navigate and does it with consummate professionalism and a very clear grasp of the film's mordant yet lively sense of humor. And of course, no discussion of Ravenous could be complete without mentioning the weird, wonderful score by Michael Nyman and Damon Albarn. The film's memorable polyrhythmic theme is at once ominously off-kilter and strangely beautiful, sounding a bit like a cross between John Carpenter's theme for Halloween and Lalo Schifrin's score for Cool Hand Luke, and one piece revolving around a 1920s archival loop is by far the creepiest thing in the whole movie. What all this adds up to, as you can probably tell, is one hell of a weird film. But oh, how gloriously weird! It is commonly observed that horror and comedy, despite all their similarities, are two genres that can be tricky to combine in a satisfying way. And with Ravenous, Antonia Bird and first-time screenwriter Ted Griffin really dance on the knife-edge of that balance. Indeed, it's easy to see how this could not connect with your average viewer; the humor is rarely laugh-out-loud funny (although Bird and Griffin aren't above going for the odd cheap joke, such as Ives' response when Knox asks if he can help with dinner), and the horror is really never particularly scary (although that sequence where Colqhoun spins his tale, aided by that apocalyptic soundtrack, is more than a little skin-crawling). And that's without getting into the film's other pointedly anti-mainstream qualities, such as its just-under-the-surface homoerotic subtext (Ives more than once goes on to Boyd about the “virility” that cannibalism bestows upon you, as well as “the potency of another running through your veins,” and the final shot we see of them is the closest thing the movie has to a passionate embrace) coupled with its almost total lack of female roles – although I would like to point out that Martha gets some interesting character beats, particularly at the end.  That's quite the soup bone. All of this probably makes it clear that the question is not “Why did Ravenous fail at the box office?” so much as “Why did 20th Century Fox take a 12 million dollar risk on a film like Ravenous in the first place?” I have a theory, and the core of it is this: the 1990s were an exceptionally strange time for horror films. At the close of the '80s, the slasher boom had pretty much crashed and burned entirely, and unless you were a notable outlier like Silence of the Lambs (probably the most widely seen of all cannibal films, incidentally), the early '90s were a very unfriendly time to be a horror movie. If the defining element of '70s horror was exploitation cinema, and the defining element of '80s horror is the slasher, the defining element of '90s horror is pretty much its absence; that is, until a certain little Wes Craven joint called Scream came around in 1996 and made close to $175 million on a $15 million budget. In the tail-end of the '90s, it was suddenly okay to be a horror movie again, and if you were a horror film with a sense of humor, even better. Still, despite how hard the film's confused marketing campaign tried to push the David Arquette connection, Ravenous was emphatically not Scream. Its humor was more bizarre, its violence was more grisly, and its leads a lot older and less pretty. On top of that, it was plagued with production troubles. Original director Milcho Manchevski was canned three weeks into production and almost replaced by Raja Gosnell (if you don't know that name, google it and despair at what Ravenous might have been) before Carlyle brought Bird on board. One suspects the troubled production and the finished product's thoroughly unmarketable nature as leading Fox to saddle Ravenous with the dreaded March release date, effectively washing their hands of the matter. Given the vocal nature of the film's small but devoted fan base, you'd be forgiven for thinking contemporaneous reviews of Ravenous were positive, but not so. The ever-reliable Roger Ebert got it, but the general reaction was decidedly mixed, for which I once again blame an overall critical landscape at the time that was not yet sure if it was now okay to praise gory horror movies. And though a cult following for Ravenous exists, it is a small and muted one. Even the horror genre's usually enthusiastic home video market failed to do much to resurrect it, with the only in-print DVD release having a cover that leaves it indistinguishable from a direct-to-video Hicksploitation flick. There has been no special edition re-release*, no 180 gram vinyl pressing of that glorious soundtrack (if the people from Death Waltz are reading this, you can take that as a hint), and repertory screenings are hard to come by. Antonia Bird never became the next Danny Boyle – she never released another theatrical film at all, in fact, and as I finish this essay I've just received the very sad news that she died far too young at the age of 54** – and that is just such a drat shame. She took a troubled disaster of a production and from it crafted a fiercely original horror film that deserves to be mentioned alongside the best works of David Cronenberg, Sam Raimi and Stuart Gordon. Like a great meal, Ravenous is something to be savored – and shared. *EDITOR'S NOTE: Since writing this essay, it has become partially obsolete, as Scream Factory is, in fact, planning a special-edition blu-ray release. **I really did get the news the very day I finished writing the essay. RIP SO! Let's use this space to talk up one of the best horror movies of the weirdest decade for horror movies. Commentary, criticism, recipes, whatever. edit: and, on my first OP ever, I hosed up the title. Vargo, help me out here. Name it whatever, just get rid of that ghastly colon. Uncle Boogeyman fucked around with this message at 00:31 on Apr 14, 2014 |
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Apr 14, 2014 00:12
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you done hosed up not embedding a song for people to play as they read that https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLt98WxrYAw "Boyd's journey" is probably more reading friendly, but i understand if you couldnt decide which to choose because i couldn't either so heres "lets go kill that bastard" too https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtyhvMrVtMM
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Apr 14, 2014 00:28
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You are very right, and I have edited accordingly. Boyd's Journey is of course the big standout, but here's the piece I was talking about that is, all on its lonesome, the creepiest thing in the movie. I think the opening sample comes from something off of The American Anthology of Folk Music (which is seriously loving essential listening for anyone into music at all), but for the life of me I can't remember which track. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCS8mGI4o7U
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Apr 14, 2014 00:31
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I loving love this movie, but I haven't seen it in a while. When I have some spare time I'll probably load it up again.
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Apr 14, 2014 00:34
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Alternatively, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCS8mGI4o7U This is one of my favorite movies and I'm glad it's being granted a release on Bluray. That soundtrack is one of a kind, and I hope it gets a rerelease as well. I tried to do it myself, and was in talks with Michael Nyman's agent but they needed Damon Albarn to sign off on it and that dude was impossible to get an answer from (busy man, busy representatives apparently too) so I kind of lost interest. I'm just really, really glad this movie exists. It's wonderful, and last week had the privilege of seeing a print on the big screen. Utterly unique.
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Apr 14, 2014 00:34
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hah good call, I was 50/50 between putting Boyd's Journey and Colquhoun's Story and just picked on a whim
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Apr 14, 2014 00:35
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The part where the banjo music kicks in makes the film and remains one of my favorite moments.
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Apr 14, 2014 04:16
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This is an excellent review of a fantastic, fun movie. I first learned about it here in Cinema Discusso a few years ago and watched the DVD thanks to Netflix. I typically don't like horror movies at all (although I'm a huge fan of Hannibal, the series), but I love Westerns, and Ravenous is in many ways a horror/psychological thriller/Western with a wicked sense of humor. It also communicates the feeling of being terribly COLD better than any movie I've ever seen, which adds to the overall sense of wrongness and unpleasantness. And I also really enjoyed the soundtrack, from what I remember of it.
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Apr 14, 2014 04:23
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Such a perfectly cast movie. Great job, OP.
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Apr 14, 2014 04:30
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I was luckily enough to be bored one saturday, and ended up watching it on Sci-Fi. I went in with zero expectations, but it turned out to be a pretty great film. While I think its a good movie on its own, its the soundtrack that truly elevates it to greatness. It even managed to salvage some scenes that I think would otherwise not have worked. Like when Toffler is being chased by Ives.
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Apr 14, 2014 05:54
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I vividly remember seeing trailers and commercials for this when it came out so I was really confused when I saw it a few years later and David Arquette had like a minute of screen time. When I worked at a video store Ravenous was the only horror movie my manager would recommend to people who asked. It was really hilarious because most of the time people hated it so I'd have people come up to me like "Hey, can you recommend a good horror movie? Your manager has terrible taste" to which I'd respond "You should check out Ravenous!"
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Apr 14, 2014 06:25
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Ives' soup a la Major Knox looks delicious. I just really like watching Carlyle put huge chunks of sliced vegetables in a boiling pot. Yum.
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Apr 14, 2014 07:24
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One of the most underappreciated movies of all time. Watch this fuckin' movie.
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Apr 14, 2014 09:05
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Forced my friends to watch it for last Halloween, outside of a very brisk third act its still a stand out film. Rare to see a horror film directed by a female director. Its a well done movie for the amount of development hell it was in. And yeah that soundtrack is a staple for any hikes into the deep dark woods. To Antonia Bird she will be missed.
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Apr 14, 2014 09:08
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I saw Ravenous in late 1999 when it was released in the UK. Back then there was a few months between US and UK releases (previously it could be as long as a year) so I'd look for the internet reactions from the US before seeing a film as well as the normal critical avenues. It was novel to get opinions from people who you'd never meet down the pub. And in 1999 there was a ton of talk. About the Blair Witch Project, The Matrix, Fight Club, American Beauty, Phantom Menace and Eyes Wide Shut, very little about Ravenous. It felt to be an odd duck in that it had a very British centre. Robert Carlyle was everywhere (Hamish McBeth, Looking After Jo Jo, Trainspotting, Plunkett and McLean, about to be a Bond villain) and Antonia Fraser had already directed him in the grim and spirited Safe as well as Priest. Guy Pearce, though more immediately coming off of LA Confidential had found fame in the UK through a couple of Australian Soaps and Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. Then there was Peter Greenaway's composer, Michael Nyman joining with Damon Albarn out of Blur. And they were taking on a world spun from Native American legend and the mythologised American Frontier. So with the unusually large amount of good films coming out in 1999 plus the disjointed feel to the idea of Ravenous, the chat on the internet about it wasn't prolific. And when it was, it was people complaining about the music. Every time the film is brought up the score is rightly praised. At the time, few seemed to get what it was doing. Or it worked too well and unsettled them so much. Having a happy joyous score when the villain is chasing down a victim threw people for a loop, as the expectation was that the score should either reflect the victims terror, make it an awesome kill scene or be the killers theme song. Twisting that perspective and using instrumentation from outside the normal orchestral armoury is one of the things that elevated the film for me. Showing the American frontier as a place not full of noble brave clean army men but dirt sodden human beings, some trying to cling onto the ideal of the regimented soldier, others simply trying to survive. That made the world exist in a place that could be real, not realistic, but natural. It made the film theatrical as opposed to a movie event like the Matrix. It feels like a full functioning piece, not a series of set pieces. I'm always pleased that it's now so well regarded.
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Apr 14, 2014 17:09
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God, I love this move. So many things make it great, from all the wonderfully quirky supporting characters to the unforgettable soundtrack and just... I don't know, it all adds up to this ineffable quality this movie has that raises it above what most films with such gruesome subject matter wind up being. It's all the little characters moments, the quirky editing and offbeat black humor that threads its way through everything. I also love the (not so subtextual) homoeroticism between the two characters that would be ruined if it were anything more overt. And that Carlyle and Pierce just act the hell out of their roles. Robert Carlyle is so freaking amazing. Another thing I find amazing is that both Guy Pierce and the director, Antonia Bird, are vegetarians! That might be mentioned in the OP (I read it all last night and don't think it was in there) but I always found it amazing that the director of such a film as Ravenous was a freaking vegetarian. Although, I suppose it does make a certain amount of sense. Oh, and while I agree that the stew looks delicious, that steak feast at the beginning of the film always makes me queasy when I watch it. edit: not steak apparently! kaworu fucked around with this message at 17:44 on Apr 14, 2014 |
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Apr 14, 2014 17:11
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I don't think I noticed that they are not eating steak, that would be a fancy rich's man's cut. They are eating shank, which is a tough cut, like oxtail. It works better with that nice round femur and the "eye" of the marrow staring up at Boyd.
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Apr 14, 2014 17:23
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I absolutely love this film! It's amazing how under the radar this film is for many people considering how great it is. What this film does best is make you feel uncomfortable throughout it. The pacing, the characters, the music, it all keeps you feeling off, really making you feel the impact of what happens in the film.
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Apr 14, 2014 17:53
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Thank you so much for posting this. I loved this film and forced everyone I knew to watch it, to a universal response of being temporarily banned from selecting anything for movie night. It's nice to know that someone else out there fell in love with this twisted mess of a movie. It certainly isn't some sort of perfect film that everyone needs to see, but anyone who has a penchant for weird movies with jarring tonal shifts and somewhat unconventional protagonists owes it to themselves. It's also just really good at whatever the director decided to do at the time. When it's trying to be scary, it's terrifying. When it's trying to be funny, it's dark and sarcastic. When it wants to capture the awful loneliness of the setting, it does. Ohthehugemanatee fucked around with this message at 18:07 on Apr 14, 2014 |
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Apr 14, 2014 18:03
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Cavenagh posted:I saw Ravenous in late 1999 when it was released in the UK. Back then there was a few months between US and UK releases (previously it could be as long as a year) so I'd look for the internet reactions from the US before seeing a film as well as the normal critical avenues. It was novel to get opinions from people who you'd never meet down the pub. And in 1999 there was a ton of talk. About the Blair Witch Project, The Matrix, Fight Club, American Beauty, Phantom Menace and Eyes Wide Shut, very little about Ravenous. It felt to be an odd duck in that it had a very British centre. Robert Carlyle was everywhere (Hamish McBeth, Looking After Jo Jo, Trainspotting, Plunkett and McLean, about to be a Bond villain) and Antonia Fraser had already directed him in the grim and spirited Safe as well as Priest. Guy Pearce, though more immediately coming off of LA Confidential had found fame in the UK through a couple of Australian Soaps and Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. Then there was Peter Greenaway's composer, Michael Nyman joining with Damon Albarn out of Blur. And they were taking on a world spun from Native American legend and the mythologised American Frontier. It's really interesting to get the contemporary British opinion on what's always felt to me like a very British film about America. Thanks for the insight. HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:I don't think I noticed that they are not eating steak, that would be a fancy rich's man's cut. They are eating shank, which is a tough cut, like oxtail. It works better with that nice round femur and the "eye" of the marrow staring up at Boyd. As a vegetarian this is something I never noticed, that's dope. kaworu posted:Another thing I find amazing is that both Guy Pierce and the director, Antonia Bird, are vegetarians! That might be mentioned in the OP (I read it all last night and don't think it was in there) but I always found it amazing that the director of such a film as Ravenous was a freaking vegetarian. Although, I suppose it does make a certain amount of sense. The stew in the "stew a la Major Knox" scene is a lamb stew. Guy Pearce would chow down and then spit it all up between takes. I had some more screenshots but I lost them, he pulls some amazing facial expressions in that scene.
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Apr 14, 2014 18:11
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Have they given a release date for the blu-ray yet?
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Apr 14, 2014 19:25
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I saw this film in the theater and always had a soft spot in my heart for it. Such a great weird treat. I know everyone goes on about Fight Club and The Matrix but Ravenous and Being John Malkovich were more along the line of my kind of film in '99.
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Apr 14, 2014 19:50
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I went into this movie not knowing much about it when it came out on the strength of the leads alone. The music seems to match the movie as much as it seems out of place. My favorite scene is when the soldier is standing dumbfounded and Ives cocks his head and simply says "Run" in this condescending tone.
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Apr 14, 2014 20:14
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The secondary character introductions in this movie are stellar. Each of them unique and memorable, and introduced in a clear and concise, and most importantly telling, way. "Private Toffler, who is our personal emissary from the Lord."  "Major Knox, who's never met a bottle he didn't like."  "Private Reich. He's our soldier. I'd stay clear of him."  "And then there's Private Cleaves. The over-medicated Private Cleaves."  kaworu posted:I always found it amazing that the director of such a film as Ravenous was a freaking vegetarian. Although, I suppose it does make a certain amount of sense. That's just perfect.
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Apr 14, 2014 23:11
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Yeah, even though I'm not veg anymore as of about a year ago, I definitely had and continue to have flashbacks to that shot of the gross bloody steak at the beginning when I look at meat a certain way.
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Apr 15, 2014 04:23
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I remember seeing this in theaters and loving it as an adolescent. It was even better when I watched it again a few years ago, as this movie really attempts to subvert your expectations, particularly with the score. There are a few scenes where you would expect a subtle, moody harmonic score to set you up for a jump scare, and instead you get an upbeat banjo that almost forces you to burst out laughing. Pearce and Carlyle are both great, but Neal McDonough captures this movies insane energy and feel better than anyone else while stealing a few scenes.
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Apr 15, 2014 04:53
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I came across this movie in perhaps the best way, not having heard anything about it, but just seeing it in the new releases at the videostore and renting it on a whim. Macdeo Lurjtux posted:I went into this movie not knowing much about it when it came out on the strength of the leads alone. The music seems to match the movie as much as it seems out of place. My favorite scene is when the soldier is standing dumbfounded and Ives cocks his head and simply says "Run" in this condescending tone. The whole scene where they go into the cave and Ives/Calhoun stays outside and just starts turning into an animal is burned into my brain. Carlyle is terrifying in this film, but when he returns as Ives he's so charismatic it's almost like an entirely different actor.
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Apr 15, 2014 08:16
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I like how when Carlyle starts cracking near the cave he starts to creepily approach Toffler while rapidly humming the religious hymn he'd been writing. For some reason I never caught that before and thought it was just complete gibberish.
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Apr 15, 2014 08:44
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Film is so underground there's nearly nothing on youtube about it. Haven't seen it but that is a disconcerting soundtrack.
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Apr 15, 2014 23:07
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Oh, I almost forgot! Here is a neat little interview with Antonia Bird from back in ye olden dayes of the AV club.
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Apr 15, 2014 23:08
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Marketing New Brain posted:Neal McDonough captures this movies insane energy and feel better than anyone else while stealing a few scenes. That man is incredibly tough, as I suppose any good soldier should be.
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Apr 16, 2014 01:48
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This and the South Park movie are the two movies that I saw with my Dad which he loved so much he insisted that we go see it a second time as a whole family unit with my Mom and sister. I didn't object at all. I really enjoy the confusion about what the movie actually is until the chase scene, which is the point that it tips the hand and lets you realize it's secretly a comedy. He was licking me happens a little earlier but that feels more uncomfortable than actually funny. One of the first movies I ever bought on DVD, and I'm a fan of the Ravenous / Repo Man double feature to test whether or not people have similar movie taste.
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Apr 16, 2014 02:54
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I always feel a little off posting in CineD when I'm just echoing everyone else's praise, but I've got to throw my hat in the ring for Ravenous. loving loved it but didn't get to see it ll the way through the first time because the aunt I was living with at the time had a horrible habit of turning every film we'd try and watch off half way through if she wasn't completely happy with it. Her word was final too, unfortunately. I did have the pleasure of introducing a friend to the film just a few months ago. He was made up with it and fell in love with the soundtrack much like everyone does.
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Apr 16, 2014 17:52
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I never realized until reading this thread that it's the same director as The Full Monty, but for some reason I can't say it's exactly surprising.
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Apr 16, 2014 18:20
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:I never realized until reading this thread that it's the same director as The Full Monty, but for some reason I can't say it's exactly surprising. Antonia Bird did not direct The Full Monty.
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Apr 16, 2014 18:22
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I've gone through three DVDs because I would take it over to a friend's place knowing they had never seen it and then they wouldn't give it back. Every time I fire it up, I get excited and then quickly sad to see Jeffrey Jones in a movie.Dissapointed Owl posted:I like how when Carlyle starts cracking near the cave he starts to creepily approach Toffler while rapidly humming the religious hymn he'd been writing.
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Apr 16, 2014 19:29
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Uncle Boogeyman posted:Antonia Bird did not direct The Full Monty. Ah, okay, I misread the article. Too bad, because I still think that would be weirdly appropriate.
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Apr 16, 2014 20:31
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Ravenous just got added to Netflix instant!
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May 1, 2014 14:10
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This really is the ultimate cult horror flick from the '90s. It's so divisive, and yet there's so much love here. CineD is great.
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May 1, 2014 15:01
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Uncle Boogeyman posted:Ravenous just got added to Netflix instant! Oh thank you so much, time to harass my facebook friends.
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May 1, 2014 18:04
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