Ravenous

Guy Pearce, Jeffrey Jones, Jeremy Davies and David Arquette play soldiers at a remote outpost in 1847 California who discover a man (Robert Carlyle) recently escaped from a stranded party that resorted to cannibalism. When the soldiers go back with him to rescue the survivors, they find that he’s not what he first seemed. Ted Griffin’s script is a deranged fusion of revisionist Western, black comedy and supernatural slasher film that defies description; it seems to have been concocted on a bet between students in a freshman screenwriting class. The ostensible “twists” in the plot are really just wild inconsistencies, but director Antonia Bird, untroubled, jumps into the bloody end of the pool with both feet.