`RAVENOUS' GETS A BIT TOO MEATY.

Byline: Bob Strauss Daily News Film Critic

Just what the world needs: a western horror comedy about cannibalism. With an agenda.

The best thing to be said about ``Ravenous'' is that it acknowledges its own fundamental looniness. The movie may take its sweet time to go over the top, and does so in a gorgeously, if incongruous, pictorial manner. But when it does let loose, it's with psychotic abandon.

Like many mad follies, this one takes the longest time to reveal just what is going on with it. At first, the film seems to be a straightforward psychological study of military cowardice. We're introduced to Capt. John Boyd (``L.A. Confidential's'' Guy Pearce), who choked and played dead during a battle of the Mexican-American War, then somehow found the gumption to single-handedly defeat an enemy unit.

Decorated but outed as a weak link - his revulsion toward those rare, juicy steaks the cavalry enjoys is a dead giveaway - Boyd is assigned to a woebegone mountain outpost in newly conquered California. The snowbound stockade boasts a cynical, literate commander (Jeffrey Jones), a religious fanatic (``Saving Private Ryan's'' Jeremy Davies), a martinet supersoldier (Neal McDonough), a drunken doc (Stephen Spinella) and a cook (David Arquette) who's more interested in the medic's pharmacopeia than in his own spice rack.

We're well into the movie before this sad excuse for an outfit is visited by a lost and starving Scottish pioneer, Colqhoun (``The Full Monty's'' Robert Carlyle), one dark and sleeting night. He tells a tragic tale of a settler band, forced by bad weather into a cave and, eventually, preyed upon by their ghoulish guide. Colqhoun claims to have escaped, and if he can bring enough men back to the isolated cavern in time, a few starving, weak survivors might be spared from the dinner plate.

Colqhoun is not telling the whole story, however. That has to do with a manifestation of the Indian myth of the Weendigo, in which a man who eats another absorbs the victim's physical and spirit power - a kind of vampire effect with roughage. Members of the fort's dwindling garrison soon face their own eat-or-be-eaten conundrums, along with whether or not they should say a lot of bad, meat-based puns.

The director, Antonia Bird, is an English lefty who stirred up some controversy with her earlier film, ``Priest.'' She tries to do it again here, but writer Ted Griffin's attempts to link eating people with America's western expansion are much sillier than they are incendiary. About the only outcries that can be expected over ``Ravenous'' will be the usual complaints of gratuitous gruesomeness.

Performances are all over the Sierra Nevadas. Carlyle and Jones get the joke and have vivid, wicked fun with their parts. Pearce goes through dark-night-of-the-soul conniptions that seem way too grave for such arch, fantastic material. For their parts, Davies and Arquette lose their characters in snowdrifts of quirky Method acting.

And the whole enterprise, really, gets pulled and dismembered in so many different genre directions that it never fully satisfies.

The facts

The film: ``Ravenous'' (R; violence, nudity).

The stars: Guy Pearce, Robert Carlyle, David Arquette, Jeremy Davies, Jeffrey Jones.

Behind the scenes: Directed by Antonia Bird. Written by Ted Griffin. Produced by Adam Fields and David Heyman. Released by 20th Century Fox.

Running time: One hour, 41 minutes.

Playing: Citywide.

Our rating: two and a half stars

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PHOTO Robert Carlyle's Scottish pioneer, left, squares off with Guy Pearce's Army captain in "Ravenous," which blends comedy and cannibalism.