March 24, 1999
Web posted at: 12:38 p.m. EST (1738 GMT)

LOS ANGELES (CNN) -- Bon appetit, moviegoers: the makers of "Ravenous" are betting a black comedy about cannibalism won't leave a bad taste in audiences' mouths.

The movie stars Guy Pearce as U.S. Army Capt. John Boyd, a disgraced soldier in the Mexican-American War reassigned to a desolate, pre-Gold Rush post in the Sierra Nevadas of California. Robert Carlyle plays Ives, a psychopathic Scottish mountain man with a taste for rare meat and Indian legend.

It's up to Carlyle ("Priest," "The Full Monty") and Pearce ("Priscilla, Queen of the Desert," "L.A. Confidential") to make this carnivorous tale palatable to movie audiences.

"The subject matter is so dark that you need the humor to counterbalance," Carlyle said.

Added Pearce, "It's a combination of horror and black comedy, I suppose, and a psychological drama."

As background to the carnage is an Indian legend that a man who eats his enemies absorbs their strength.

Where screenwriter Ted Griffin uses the gruesome subject and setting -- the same mountains where the ill-fated Donner Party was snowbound and forced to eat their own to survive -- to draw parallels to the westward expansion of the United States, the actors see a link to today's California lifestyle.

"You can relate that to a lot people these days who are having a ton of plastic surgery and, and just not facing the fact that they are going to get old and die," Pearce said.

Carlyle said his homicidal connoisseur "is struggling for eternal life, for health and physical prowess and virility and vitality."

"Look around you in L.A., you know, there's an awful lot of that still goes on. So Ives, for me, is almost the first Californian," he said.

Neither Pearce, an Australian, nor the real-life Scot Carlyle call Hollywood home, yet they have made their mark on the film industry.

Carlyle said his role in "The Full Monty," the breakout English hit, "was a real turning point in my life. It's taken me on a slightly different route, a slightly different road," he said.

Carlyle will appear in the upcoming "Angela's Ashes," based on the Frank McCourt book about growing up in Ireland, and in an upcoming James Bond film -- a project that caught his particular fancy.

"I remember going to see Bond movies with my father in the '60s and the early '70s when Connery, Sean Connery was playing Bond," Carlyle said. "I genuinely believed at that time as a kid that he was the only Scottish actor, because he was the only guy out there on that screen that kind of sounded a little bit like me."

Meanwhile, both Carlyle and Pearce hope their performances in "Ravenous" will keep audiences hungering for more.

CNN Showbiz Correspondent Lauren Hunter contributed to this report.