I just couldn't bring myself to go check out a new movie this weekend. The Independent looks vaguely interesting, sure, but Jerry Stiller is sort of a wary name for me. I do not possess the mental fortitude nor the deep-rooted love of masochism necessary to bear witness to Jason X. And while it is a known quantity that I have a lawsuit-worthy obsession with Angelina Jolie, Edward Burns' mere presence is enough to keep me the hell away from Life or Something Like It. So what's an idolized (ha, ha) web critic to do? Why, bring light to an unappreciated classic, that's what. I'm talking about Ravenous. What's Ravenous, you may ask? Well, pull up a chair and let me tell you.

Flashback to the Spanish-American War. Lieutenant John Boyd (Guy Pearce) is a rather cowardly member of the US Army, and while his men die around him, Boyd plays dead and gets himself dragged to a pile of corpses by the Mexican army. After spending some quality time with blood dripping down his throat, Boyd gains a sudden burst of courage, and with the element of surprise, captures enemy command and singlehandedly turns the tide of battle.

Army command is not impressed. They know the scoop. In order to save face for themselves, Boyd is promoted to Captain and transferred to one Fort Spencer, a dysfunctional shanty town of a place high up in the Sierra Nevadas, far from civilization and sanity. The staff of the place is naturally quirky: Jeffrey Jones as the charming, well-read Col. Hart, Jeremy Davies as the resident soldier-missionary Private Toffler, Neal McDonough as the militant Private Reich (a soldier whose appearance is as Aryan as his last name), and David Arquette as the perpetually stoned Private Cleaves.

Arquette's job is to be dumb. He does it really well.

But all of this is tertiary. The real story begins when a one-man disaster by the name of F.W Colqhoun (Robert Carlyle, in what has to be his greatest role of all time) stumbles into Fort Spencer late one night, freezing from the cold outside and a step or two away from death by starvation. When he recovers, the occupants of Fort Spencer gather around to listen to the tale of how this self-proclaimed man of God found himself wandering in the wilderness.

Colqhoun's tale is familiar to anyone who's ever read the story of the infamous Donner Party: group of fortune-seekers heading west get stuck in the mountains during a long snowstorm, hole up in a cave, run out of food, and start eyeing each other. One of the party dies of malnutrition, and the evil Colonel leading the troupe tosses the corpse onto the fire.

Human meat turns out to be good. Real good. In fact, it's so good the other members of the party find themselves... addicted to it. And they run out of meat far too quickly. The party turns to murder, until all that's left of the original troupe of six is Colqhoun, the evil Colonel, and a Mrs. McCready. In a fit of cowardice (and at the mention of the C word, Boyd becomes much more interested), Colqhoun ran and left Mrs. McCready alone with the ravenous Colonel. Our Heroes, Colqhoun in tow, decide to make the march back to the cave to save Mrs. McCready and bring the Colonel to justice. In the back of his head, Boyd makes a connection. If the consumption of human flesh and blood brings renewed vigor and virility, did the blood coursing down his throat in Mexico give him the extra kick to take the Mexican command hostage? If so, could human flesh make him brave again...?

But no more plot discussion. Ravenous is at its heart a vampire flick that cleverly replaces bloodsucking with cannibalism. The benefits are roughly the same -- regeneration, heightened senses, renewed youth, vigor, charisma. Still, if we were dealing with a vampires, your average filmmaker (and this film's director, Antonia Bird, is anything but) would take the temptation to make the main antagonist tragic, sexy, even romantic. Easy to do for a pale, beautiful vampire sipping red fluid. Not so easy if the charming man is roasting someone's leg over a fire.

The sheer oddity of this film cannot be expressed in words. How well do critics, and the Idiot American Public, receive a Cannibal/Vampire/Horror/Dark Comedy/Drama/Action/Western? Not very well. The film works on several levels, and pulls off the trick of being both humorous and horrifying at the same time. The last film to do something like that successfully was... well... nothing I can think of, really.

Let's not forget the power of the performances. Watch the shift of Carlyle's character in Colqhoun; he starts pitiable, repentant, and horrified at his own deeds, and gradually becomes more and more untrustworthy, perhaps even ghoulish... Watch as Pearce's character Boyd wallows in his own Hell of regret, subtly tempted to test his theory about the renewing powers of human flesh. Boyd is deathly afraid of confrontation, yet he is the only one who knows the horror and addiction of what Fort Spencer's men face. Can he swallow his fear and fight back? Will he resist the temptation to eat again?

Sounds deathly serious, and for the most part it is, but no movie is entirely dramatic that includes lines like "It's lonely being a cannibal; tough making friends!"

But no discussion of Ravenous would be complete without mentioning the score. Any instrumental score composed by Brit pop frontman Damon Albarn and composer Michael Nyman (The Piano) just has to be interesting as all hell. And it is. Don't ask me how, but those two bastards pull it off -- who would think a lively banjo could accompany a chilling cat-and-mouse chase through a forest so well? Or how about that odd combination of keyboard and violins for the sorrowful main theme?

What Ravenous is, at its end, is a highly moral tale about corruption, debauchery, and courage set against the highly appropriate metaphor of America's Manifest Destiny. The rich colors, the atmospheric music, the flawless directing, the diabolical and sympathetic acting -- it just works.

I do warn you that Ravenous is certainly not a film for everyone, and very seldom do people walk away from it with a mediocre opinion; they either love it or hate it. Either way you feel, I'm fine; great loathing or great admiration are to be strived for, as mediocrity is the greatest sin a film could ever commit. And either way, Ravenous is far, far from mediocre.