on Ravenous<\/em>, a cannibal Western with a Looney Tunes win-by-losing climax\u2013yes, I loved it:<\/p>\n 1999\u2032s Ravenous<\/em> turns up on a lot of lists of underrated horror movies. It\u2019s hard to get people to take you seriously when your plot is, \u201cGuy Pearce eats people in the Old West.\u201d But now that I\u2019ve finally taken advantage of \u201cRavenous\u201d\u2018s availability through Netflix streaming, I can tell you: This movie is criminally<\/em> underrated. It\u2019s not just a creepy, haunting cannibal Western from the producer of \u201cDonnie Darko,\u201d although that sounds great to me; it\u2019s also an exploration of the temptations of power and the acceptance of powerlessness.<\/p>\n The movie is set in the aftermath of the Mexican-American War. Captain John Boyd (Pearce) was so terrified by battle that he played dead\u2014and, posing as a corpse, he was dragged behind enemy lines, where he staged a one-man ambush. His superiors pin a medal on him, but make sure he knows how much they really despise him for his initial loss of nerve. They send him away to a remote California outpost.<\/p>\n Already in these first fifteen minutes so many of the movie\u2019s strengths are on display. The music is distinctive\u2014Western in style, much less plangent than most horror scores, imaginative and non-intrusive. Over the course of the movie it will become steadily more modern. The movie\u2019s humor and self-awareness come through at the outpost, which is staffed by stock characters: the eccentric leader (Jeffrey Jones, feisty and fun), the praying man, the scarily enthusiastic killing machine, the drunk.<\/p>\n And from its first scenes \u201cRavenous\u201d zeroes in on the two questions which will determine the film\u2019s storyline: Whose stories are believed, whose versions of the truth are accepted? And is the moral life simply a choice between conquest and cowardice?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n