Gluttons for punishment

Ravenous (18) What is Ravenous? You could call it a Western - it plays out on the open frontier of 19th-century America. Or a horror flick - it's about demonic cannibals who eat folk alive. Or a comedy - because, sporadically at least, it's quite funny. But each time you think you have the thing pinned down, it switches costumes; affects a new guise.

Ravenous, then, is a garbled one-off; a garish gumbo of tones and genres. As with the film, so with its lead character. The first time we see Colquhoun (Robert Carlyle) he's anguished and adrift; a half- starved scarecrow who fetches up at a remote army base with a tale to chill the souls of those huddled round the campfire. It transpires that Colquhoun was once a happy-go-lucky pioneer, westward-bound amid a raggle-taggle wagon train. But during a frozen winter lost without food in the mountains, the group fell to eating each other. Colquhoun escaped. The others are still out there.

His story complete, Colquhoun leads a rescue party into the wilderness. What the soldiers don't realise - but soon will - is that Colquhoun is not victim but monster; not dinner but diner. Cue shock turnabout. Cue abrupt splurges of ketchup.

It's during this fraught middle section (the main course, as it were) that Ravenous is at its most effective. It plays like a day-glo horror comic; all close-up screaming, biff-bang-pow collisions and lightning-bolt exclamation marks.

Attempting to escape from this seemingly indestructible devil, Guy Pearce's army captain tumbles head-first down a forested mountainside, and the camera goes with him all the way - bouncing off the rocks, crashing through the bracken - in what may well prove to be the year's most perfectly sustained stunt sequence.

But inevitably the rest of Ravenous struggles to match this intensity. The opening scenes - establishing Pearce as the yarn's nominal hero - look leisurely by comparison; the denouement back at the base a predictable round of cat-and-mouse shenanigans.

Meantime, running from top to tail are a few haphazard nods to profundity. Colquhoun's insatiable cannibalism is welded onto a wider thesis on the rapacious nature of westward expansion and (by implication) the capitalist order it gave rise to. The trouble is that such lofty leanings sit awkwardly amid the noisy carnage of Ravenous, and the film as a whole fails to gel.

Perhaps this pick-and-mix quality merely reflects the picture's troubled production. Ravenous was initially to be shot in Nevada until spiralling costs forced a move into the mountains of the Czech Republic. The Macedonian film-maker Milcho Manchevski was down to direct - but the studio, Fox, fired him two weeks into the shoot.

For a time, Ravenous was in limbo, until Carlyle exerted his star muscle and insisted on his old collaborator Antonia Bird being brought in to salvage things. Had Fox vetoed Bird, Carlyle reckons he'd have walked. As it is, he stayed put - and his driven performance is one of the highlights of the finished product.

Bird, too, has done a good job in piecing Ravenous together. One suspects that her role was less straight movie-making then a kind of filmic renovation: working with the material she already had, shoring it up here, planing it down there.

But, however hard she worked, Ravenous was never going to be Bird's movie. Ultimately, perhaps, this strange mongrel of a film belongs to everybody who had a hand in it. Look closely and you can probably see them there, torn off from the arms and stewing in the hot-pot that Colquhoun cooks up at the end. Apparently it tastes like pork Xan Brooks

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