It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

Blistering performances.

If only todays film makers could make anything even half as good as this then all would be well.This film is brilliantly shot, acted and executed and is what I would consider to be a cult classic.Just watch it...

I first saw this on a VHS. Revisited it recently on a blu ray. This movie seemed to have come up with a unique and interesting angle to the usual cannibal story. Captain Boyd (Guy Pearce) is assigned a post at the remote Fort Spencer in the wilderness inspite of defeating the enemy command as it was an act of cowardice that got him there. The others at the fort are two Indians, three private soldiers , one Major n one Colonel. When a stranger (Carlyle) appears and recovers from frostbite almost instantly after being bathed, he tells a story about his party leader, Ives, eating members of the party to survive. As part of their duty, they must go up to the cave where this occurred to see if any have survived. Only three people stay behind. The Indian warns that since the stranger (Carlyle) admits to eating human flesh, he must be a Windigo, a ravenous cannibalistic creature. Cinematographer Anthony B. Richmond captured the striking imagery of vast, snowy landscapes very well. U r transported to the snow-covered peaks of the landscape of the Sierra Nevada wilderness circa 1847. The quirky, versatile score also stands out. The acting is phenomenal, especially by Carlyle n Pearce. Ives (the cannibalistic wendigo) is one of the best villain brought to screen. One of the best part of this movie is that its not at all predictable.

Wow. Just wow. Saw it an hour ago. Right now I still feel overwhelmed by this movie. Certainly one of the best i've seen in the past few years. Some reviews here have already perfectly outlined what to admire in this film; so i am content with just sharing some of my genuine enthusiasm with you.First off the music is fantastic. When early in the story my mind was still trying to grasp the intent of the movie, it's distinctive music was the first thing that stood out to me. It sparked and fueled my intrigue. The soundtrack showed to be pretty unique and effectively conveys the essence of the different visual moods it accompanies throughout the film. Like others mentioned, this movie is witty, violent, cynical, hopeful and humorous at once, in no specified order. It shocked me and disgusted me, but also made me laugh and think deeper when it presented me it's philosophical questions.I'm already pondering on how to do this movie justice when telling my friends about it. It might be smart to not raise their expectations too high, as not knowing what to expect certainly did not hurt the process of me slowly getting in awe with this movie.

One of the most original movies ever made. Also one of the funniest black comedies of all time. It's funny the same way Fargo is. In fact, if the Coen Brothers ever returned to their thriller roots, or made a straight up horror, this is the type of movie they might end up with.This AV Club blurb does a spot on job of conveying why this movie is so good.It may be hard to believe now, but once upon a time — call it the late Nineties — a major movie studio sunk $12 million into a comedic western about 19th century soldiers who believed eating other humans endow folks with superhuman strength and the ability to recover from life- threatening injuries. When shooting on the film crashed to a halt after three weeks of interference and executive micromanaging, one of the suits at at 20th Century Fox hit upon an idea: fire director Milcho Manchevski — the Macedonian art house sensation whose devastating wartime romance Before the Rain was nominated for an Oscar — and replace him with Raja Gosnell, whose only feature credit to date was Home Alone 3. Shockingly, it didn't work out.The cast, lead by Guy Pearce and Robert Carlyle (fresh off his BAFTA-winning performance in The Full Monty), rejected Gosnell like a body denying a transplanted heart, and Ziskin's filmmaker of choice returned to the comforts of his wheelhouse in Los Angeles, where he would promptly get to work on Never Been Kissed. Carlyle eventually pressured Fox into filling the director's chair with his trusted collaborator, Antonia Bird, a veteran of British TV whose best known feature on these shores was Priest, about a closeted man of the cloth. It did not sound like an ideal match- up. Shockingly, it turned out great.Ravenous is a film that, by design, was forced to thread the needle between three different genres, a challenge that few directors have the finesse to overcome under normal circumstances — let alone on a project that had more cooks in the kitchen than it did carnivores on screen. Kicking off with the twang of a banjo that might not have been tuned since 1846, this Mulligan's stew of a movie walks such a fine line between bleak comedy ("He was licking me!"), hyper- violent survival drama, and supernatural creature-feature that the guy narrating the trailer seems to have no idea what he's actually selling. Advertising lies all the time, but seldom is it so confused: "One man must choose between having dinner, and being dinner…" (You wait for him to follow that oddly jokey declaration up with "I guess?") Audiences of the time can hardly be blamed for not being sold.But while many studio boondoggles betray the messiness of their making (Fantastic Four, anyone?), this ragged, unsung 1999 gem was one of the very few that was able to feed off the chaos. An origin story about the American spirit, the film is a lot like America itself: a melting pot of disparate elements, thrown together in a fit of violence, and galvanized by the righteous illusion that this is how God intended it to be.Subtlety is not on the menu here, and it's easy to imagine how the bluntness of the script by Ted Griffin (Ocean's 11) helped it weather the constant assault of studio notes and creative upheaval. The story begins by introducing us to Second Lieutenant John Boyd (Guy Pearce), a Mexican- American War vet who's being promoted to Captain after killing an entire unit of enemy soldiers on their own turf. The problem is that, after playing dead and being stacked in a heap of corpses, our hero was only capable of such battlefield bravery because of an unsettling jolt of strength — which he got from drinking trickling-down blood. Boyd is now nauseated at the sight of raw meat; he pukes behind a tent after a celebratory banquet as the title card flashes on screen. Laughs are usually the first things that get lost when a movie is Frankensteined together, but the film's sick sense of humor remained intact.Surprisingly, a story that rubs our faces in America's ongoing history of cannibalism (cultural, commercial, or otherwise) is always going to be a tough sell in a country that still celebrates Columbus Day. Ravenous bombed at the box office, grossing $10 million less than it cost to make and anticipating a climate where a film like this would be lucky to premiere at Fantastic Fest in advance of a straight-to-VOD release. Perhaps that's for the best. A major studio trying to wrangle something so bloodthirsty and off-kilter is like a child trying to raise a feral hyena — it's too wild to tame, and it's always laughing at you for trying.But maybe this movie isn't quite as bleak as it appeared at the time; maybe this is just a case of not being able to see the forest for the trees. For all of its nihilism, this perverse take on the weird, weird West digs so deep into the darkness that it eventually shines a light out through other side. Like Colqhoun, it knows that we have to face the truth — and like Boyd, it knows that doesn't mean we have to live with it. To quote the film's opening title card, it's never too late to say "Eat me."