horror

Shadow in the Cloud (2021)

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One of my favorite films of all time is Richard Kelly’s The Box, a much-mocked sci-fi thriller that starts as a faithful adaptation of a Twilight Zone plot (Richard Matheson’s short story “Button, Button” to be specific), then spirals out to become its own over-the-top art object once that story runs its course.  I was delighted to see that template repeated in Shadow in the Cloud, then, which starts as a copyright-infringing adaptation of the Twilight Zone classic “Nightmare at 20,0000 Feet”, then mutates into its own monstrous beast separate from its obvious source of inspiration.  The difference is that The Box expands on its core Twilight Zone story with a flood of increasingly outlandish, convoluted Ideas that explode the initial premise into scattered, irretrievable shrapnel.  By contrast, Shadow in the Cloud reduces the initially bizarre outline of “Terror at 20,000 Feet” to the most basic, straightforward hand-to-hand combat action fluff imaginable.  It just does so with a full-on Richard Kelly level commitment to the bit, creating something truly spectacular purely out of brute force.

When Shadow in the Cloud is still limited to its “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” beginnings, it does a decent enough job at finding new sources of tension & purpose in that dusty genre template.  Chloë Grace Moretz stars as a WWII fighter pilot who’s at the mercy of an overly suspicious, grotesquely macho cargo-run crew who don’t trust her presence on their plane.  To neutralize her potential threat to their mission, the men confine her to a gun turret below the plane’s belly, where she’s isolated—and lethally armed—in a free-floating bubble.  The combination of that confined space, the radio chatter from the misogynist assholes above (who keep referring to her as a “dame” and a “broad” instead of a fellow soldier), and the eventual emergence of the Twilight Zone version of a gremlin on the plane’s wings is a wonderful tension-builder that makes full, glorious use of its seemingly limited, familiar premise.  It’s the lengthy, over-the-top release of that tension in the film’s third act that really achieves something special, though.

After listening to the men on the plane delegitimize and sexualize her for the entire ride—while also ignoring her warnings of the gremlin on the wings and enemy fighters in the clouds—Moretz explodes into action.  Once she emerges from her gun-turret prison cell, her deathmatch with the gremlin is nonstop carnage and catharsis, indulging in a Looney Tunes sense of physics & decorum that’s wildly divergent from the film’s confined-space beginnings. The 1940s setting is harshly contrasted with an 80s-synth John Carpenter score as Moretz proves herself to be the toughest solider on-board, effectively tearing the gremlin to shreds with her own bare hands as her fellow soldiers fall to their peril.  It’s the same grounded-war-narrative-to-outrageous-horror-schlock trajectory played with in 2018’s Overlord, except in this case the grotesquely monstrous enemy is American misogynists rather than Nazi combatants.

It may not be as gloriously inane as The Box (few films are), but Shadow in the Cloud is a total blast.  It’s 80 minutes of delicious, delirious pulp, settling halfway between a dumb-fun creature feature and a sincerely performed radio play.  Not for nothing, it’s also the first time I’ve ever enthusiastically enjoyed a Chloë Grace Moretz performance, as I spent the final half hour of the film cheering her on as if she were a pro wrestler taking down the ultimate heel.  I would love to live in a world where every classic Twilight Zone episode were exploited as a jumping-off point for an over-the-top sci-fi thriller that reaches beyond the outer limits of a 20min premise – especially if they all could manage to be this wonderfully absurd.

-Brandon Ledet

The New Mutants (2020)

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Plenty was already written about the X-Men genre-bender The New Mutants in the years before its actual release.  Thanks to its very public production troubles, post-production tinkering, and release-date delays since its teaser trailer premiered in movie theaters way back in the Before Times of 2017, The New Mutants has been engaged with more as a News Item than as a Movie.  I’ve even personally contributed to that phenomenon myself, cheekily declaring it to be “The Defining Film of the 2010s” a full year before it ever screened for the public.  After living with the Idea of the movie and its bungled potential to mutate the superhero genre into an entirely new beast for multiple calendar years, general audiences (or at least the nerds who pay attention to this kind of cultural runoff) couldn’t help but enter The New Mutants with rigid preconceptions of what it was going to be – whether expecting a playful superhero-horror genre hybrid or an incomprehensible editing room disaster.  It’s hilarious to me, then, that its journey into wide distribution ended with the film being unceremoniously dumped into empty movie theaters in the middle of a global pandemic, then quietly surfacing on cable television just a few months later to practically zero fanfare.  In retrospect, it was the only fitting conclusion to that sad, drawn-out saga.

Approximately one million years ago, I was pretty dang excited for The New Mutants.  The now-ancient teaser trailer for the film/news-item promised an X-Men version of The Dream Warriors, indicating that the superhero genre had established a sturdy enough cultural footing that it could now experiment with subgenre detours—including, apparently, Nightmare on Elm Street riffs—without alienating general audiences.  The finished product (which is, reportedly, the exact version of the film director Josh Boone intended to release in the first place) is unfortunately much more timid than the horror genre detour I was expecting.  Instead of a Mutant Dream Warriors creep-out, The New Mutants is essentially just the YA version of Glass.  Its target audience skews way younger than what I initially hoped for, reeling in the broader possibilities of a superhero-horror blockbuster to settle for a PG-13 thriller aimed specifically at teens.  It even openly acknowledges that aim by including multiple scenes where the Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV show is playing on a background television, clearly indicating the exact kind of media it hopes to emulate.  Re-orienting its context from X-Men on Elm Street to over-the-plate PG-13 horror required a major expectation adjustment for me. Once I understood where it was coming from, though, I actually found the film passably decent . . .  give or take a few ridiculous accents & wigs.

Like The Dream Warriors, The New Mutants features a small group of traumatized teens living in shared confinement in a mental ward, each haunted by the literalized versions of their worst nightmares.  Except, in this case the teens are all X-Men type mutants in training.  Also, instead of their worst fears being brought to life by the wicked scamp Freddy Krueger, it’s the fault of a new recruit who doesn’t yet know how to control her unwieldy powers.  Because this is a superhero film, the surrealism of that teen-mutants-vs-their-own-psyches premise is eventually reduced to a smash-em-up CGI battle with a single, destructive villain (in this case, a kaiju-scale Demon Bear), but there are some truly great creature designs & jump scare gags in the build-up to that inevitable climax.  Its commitment to PG-13 scares means there’s no true body count, and the cast is rounded out by less-than-charismatic performances from TV-star teens who got their start in now-dusty properties like Game of Thrones & Stranger Things (including a career-worst performance from usual-MVP Anya Taylor-Joy). As far as tween-friendly horror goes, though, it ain’t half bad.  If nothing else, it scores easy bonus points for being centered around a cute, queer romance that’s more genuinely hormonal than what’s typical for the superhero genre, even in properties that are supposedly aimed at adults.

As a news item, The New Mutants was a cultural time capsule that typified a wide range of ways mainstream blockbusters were marketed, edited, distributed, and passed around between corporate buyouts in the 2010s.  As a movie, it’s nothing special – especially not in a market already flooded with similar #content like Split, Morgan, Legion, The Umbrella Academy, and Ms. Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children.  It could have been a game-changer within the superhero genre, had it taken the genre-blurring risks teased in its early advertisements.  Still, that doesn’t mean it can’t be enjoyed for what it actually is: a dumb-fun popcorn movie for teens.

-Brandon Ledet

The Alien Movies Rated and Ranked

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Alien (1979)

An exquisitely fucked up mutation of the Roger Corman creature feature.  So many dirt-cheap horrors in its wake have aimed for its exact quietly eerie mood and inspired only frustrated boredom in the attempt.  Here, every scare is a sharp knife to the brain no matter how familiar you are with what’s coming.  I still can’t look directly at Giger’s goopy sex monster without shivering in pure disgust all these sequels & knockoffs later.  Like the original Terminator, it’s got a reputation of having been surpassed by its louder, better-funded spawn, but I don’t believe that’s true for a second.

Alien: Resurrection (1997)

Far from the scariest entry in the franchise, but easily the most fun.  The whole thing plays like a live-action cartoon, and its blasphemous disinterest in series lore is a refreshing blast of fresh air after watching Fincher take everything so relentlessly serious in its predecessor.  Great creature gags, some endearingly goofy character work, and a wonderfully imaginative eye from Jeunet, as always.  Big fan.

Prometheus (2012)

Fantastic mix of ludicrous retro sci-fi pulp & elegant visual artistry.  I am forever in love with the idea of humans asking Big, Important philosophical questions about our origins & purpose to literal gods and receiving only brutal, wordless violence in response.  Still kicking myself for allowing the negative word-of-mouth to talk me out of seeing it in 3D on the big screen when I had the chance.

Aliens (1986)

I’ll always have some philosophical hang-ups with the way Cameron simplifies & normalizes the subliminal nightmare fuel of the first Alien movie for much more familiar blockbuster entertainment.  It’s still great as a standalone action movie though!  Stan Winston’s wizardly creature effects are especially praiseworthy, affording the xenomorphs an exciting feeling of agility that matches the increased momentum of the shoot-em-up action sequences.  I’ll never buy into the myth that this & T2 are somehow superior to their predecessors just because of their slicker production values, and the Director’s Cut’s sprawling 154min runtime is a crime against all reason & good taste.  And yet pushing back against its hyperbolic reputation comes across as contrarian blasphemy, when the truth is it’s just a solidly entertaining popcorn movie and that’s a pleasure in itself.

AvP: Requiem (2007)

This is widely understood to be the worst Alien film, but I thoroughly enjoy it as dumb-fun teen horror. If nothing else, it’s impressively efficient and Mean. The gore gags are plentiful & cruel, maintaining a consistently entertaining rhythm of nasty, amoral kills. It’s like a modern throwback to the Roger Corman creature feature, with a suburban-invasion angle that brings some much-needed novelty to two once-great franchises that were running out of steam. I honestly believe that if it featured warring alien creatures that weren’t associated with pre-existing series, it wouldn’t be nearly as reviled. It probably wouldn’t be remembered at all, though, so maybe it’s for the best that it ruffled horror-nerd feathers.

Alien Covenant (2017)

Instead of aiming for the arty pulp of Prometheus, Covenant drags the Alien series’ newfound philosophical themes back down to the level of a body-count slasher.  This prequel/sequel is much more of a paint-by-numbers space horror genre picture than its predecessor, but that’s not necessarily a quality that ruins its premise.  Through horrific cruelty, striking production design, and the strangest villainous performance to hit a mainstream movie in years (it really should be retitled Michael Fassbender: Sex Robot), this easily gets by as a memorably entertaining entry in its series. If it could be considered middling, it’s only because the Alien franchise has maintained a better hit-to-miss ratio than seemingly any other decades-old horror brand has eight films into its catalog.

Alien³ (1992)

Really pushes the limits of the dictum “There’s no such thing as a bad Alien movie.”  Even the revised Assembly Cut is an excessively dour bore, and the only thing that breathes any life into the damned thing is the continued instinctive terror of Giger’s creature designs (though the green sheen of the early-90s CGI isn’t doing that aesthetic any favors).  Its only illuminating accomplishment is helping make sense why Jeunet was hired for the next entry in the series, as it often looks & feels like one of his steampunk grotesqueries with all of the Fun & Whimsy surgically removed. Otherwise, it just coasts on the series’ former glories.

AvP: Alien vs Predator (2004)

Maybe the most frustrating movie in the Alienverse for being deliriously stupid fun for its final 20 minutes or so, but not worth the effort it takes to get there.  The restorative praise for it in Horror Noire had me hoping for a different reaction than I had in the theater, but this viewing was mostly a repeat: bored out of my skull for the first hour and then cheering on its climactic team-up sequence as if I were watching the creature-feature Super Bowl.  Appropriately, that’s also a pretty accurate summation of Paul WS Anderson’s entire career; there’s just enough unhinged, goofball fun to keep your rooting for him even though he fumbles the ball every single game.

-Brandon Ledet

Episode #132 of The Swampflix Podcast: The Astounding She-Monster (1957) & A Tale of Two Shirleys

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Welcome to Episode #132 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Britnee and Brandon investigate the urban legend that Shirley Stoler (The Honeymoon Killers/Seven Beauties) is actually an alias of Shirley Kilpatrick (The Astounding She-Monster), a relic of pre-Internet rumor & speculation.

00:00 Welcome

03:45 Sabrina (1995)
08:30 What Lies Below (2020)
12:50 The Demon Lover (1976)
16:30 Demon Lover Diary (1980)

21:21 Shirley Stoler vs. Shirley Kilpatrick
30:30 The Astounding She-Monster (1957)
40:30 The truth about the Shirleys
43:55 Seven Beauties (1975)

Additional research provided by CC Chapman

You can stay up to date with our podcast by subscribing on  SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, YouTube, or TuneIn.

– Britnee Lombas & Brandon Ledet

Godzilla vs. Kong (2021)

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Finally, I can say I enthusiastically enjoyed an American Godzilla film.  Weirdly, it happened to be the one that stars King Kong.

The ongoing MonsterVerse franchise has been building up to this moment since 2014, ever since Godzilla re-emerged from the ocean waves with a chonky, dour make-over.  Every entry in that franchise so far has tread in varying shades of mediocrity while trying to offer an MCU-scale franchise to the King of the Monsters: 2014’s Godzilla in its tedious attempts at self-serious majesty, 2017’s Kong: Skull Island in its goofball aping of Vietnam War Movie tropes, and 2019’s Godzilla: King of the Monsters in its muddled, belabored kaiju fight choreography.  Even though those films have been on a steady incline in terms of pure entertainment value, I did not expect the quality to shoot so high in Adam Wingard’s contribution to the series.  Godzilla vs Kong is just incredibly fun to watch in a way previous MonsterVerse films haven’t been.  Its monster action is constantly inventive, surprising, tactile, and gross – majorly exceeding the expectations set by its more cautious, middling predecessors.

Director Gareth Edwards was widely mocked for describing his 2014 Godzilla film as a “post-human blockbuster,” but I feel like this years-later sequel actually makes that phrase mean something.  In Godzilla vs Kong, the titular monsters are the main characters of their shared film (with Kong playing Lead and Godzilla settling for Supporting).  The humans on the ground level merely orbit around the kaiju like satellites around a planet or flies around a picnic spread, adding nothing consequential to the narrative.  Each monster is paired with a young child who believes in their respective Good Nature: King Kong with a deaf cutie who teaches him American Sign Language and Godzilla with returning-player Millie Bobby Brown, who’s gotten really into conspiracy podcasts since her last appearance (making this the second film in the very niche genre of Big-Budget Horror Sequels You Would Not Expect To Be About Podcasting, after 2018’s Halloween).  They’re both adorable but make very little impact. The bulk of the storytelling is illustrated through the kaiju fights themselves, the same way that broad soap opera narratives are conveyed in the wrestling ring.

Wingard’s major accomplishment here is in punching up the action choreography in the film’s fight sequences.  Although both creatures are CGI, the impact of their blows hits with genuine force & resistance.  Wingard simulates the body-mounted camera trickery, jaw-crunching jabs, and earth-shaking thuds that make human-on-human fight choreography in modern action cinema feel tactile & “real”.  When Godzilla wrestles Kong under the ocean, the ape emerges to puke up the water he’s inhaled.  When Kong rips off the head of a lesser beast, he drinks blood from its corpse in ecstatic victory.  This may be the cinematic equivalent of a young child smashing their action figures together in a sandbox, but it’s at least a child with a sense of humor & spatial reasoning.  By the time our two sky-high combatants are squaring off in the neon lights & smoke of a half-smashed Hong Kong, I can’t imagine having any other response to this film other than an enthusiastic “Fuck yeah!”

I understand the argument that a Godzilla film shouldn’t be this gleefully hollow.  Considering the creature’s grim-as-fuck origins in the 1954 original, I totally see how treating this property like another (better) adaptation of the Rampage arcade game could come across as artistic blasphemy. There are plenty of Japanese sequels to Godzilla that are equally, deliberately goofy, though, and Wingard’s film feels true enough to their smash-em-up spirit.  Godzilla vs. Kong cannot compete with the best of its Japanese predecessors, especially not all-time classic titles like Godzilla (1954), Godzilla vs. Hedorah (1971), or even the recent satirical reboot Shin Godzilla (2017).  As far as American takes on this character go, however, I believe this is by far the best to date.  When Gareth Edwards attempted to make a dead-serious Godzilla film respectful to the monster’s roots, he inspired far more boredom than awe.  Respectful or not, Godzilla vs Kong is not at all boring.  It’s fun as hell.

-Brandon Ledet

Slaxx (2021)

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You would think that a low-budget, 70min horror movie about a killer pair of blue jeans would be met with lowered, forgiving expectations, but the truth is that Slaxx has a lot to live up to.  Not only has the early buzz about this satirical, shopping mall-set horror comedy been generally positive, but the bar for movies about killer inanimate objects has been set weirdly high in recent years – especially when it comes to killer fashion.  Between In Fabric (about a killer cocktail dress), Deerskin (about a killer deerskin jacket), and Bad Hair (about a killer hair weave), this once-niche genre has recently ballooned to include plenty of genuinely great, surprisingly thoughtful horror novelties.  Unfortunately, the killer blue jeans movie doesn’t quite clear the hurdle set by those superior works, but if it were just a smidge funnier or politically sharper it might’ve gotten there.

Slaxx joins the much wider, richer genre of Shopping Mall Horror by setting its blue jeans bloodbath in a parody version of stores like American Apparel and H&M.  It smiling, supposedly philanthropic corporation professes to be “Making a better world today” through the sale of trendy green-fashions, but secretly outsources its clothes’ production to subcontractors who employ child-labor facilities in India, often with lethal consequences.  That’s how the roll-out of their new, Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants style one-size-fits-all-blue-jeans becomes sabotaged by the vengeful ghost of a child laborer, who possesses the blue jeans in order to massacre the company’s employees & clientele.  There are some well-observed political targets in that premise, especially in how consumers are in constant hunt of new, affordable clothing but don’t want to pay attention to the human rights violations that make that product possible (or, worse yet, want to be tricked into thinking their purchases are doing a real world good).  Unfortunately, the film’s humor is too broad & too self-amused to be worth much.  Its sketch-comedy level parodies of vapid YouTube Influencers™ or teenage Mean Girls don’t really have a place in what’s essentially a corporate-world satire; or at least they’re not nearly funny enough to earn one.

The frustrating thing is that the film’s actual horror gags are on-point, even if its satirical humor is loose & unfocused.  The blue jeans puppetry is especially cute, smartly opting for practical greenscreen effects over the weightless CGI buffoonery you’d expect.  There are plenty of great jeans-specific gore gags peppered throughout the film, including some gnarly images of the killer pants using their zippers as teeth to gnaw off their victims’ limbs or gathering in circles to gently slurp up the resulting pools of blood.  And when the movie isn’t making fun of the store’s teen employees for being airheaded Zoomers, it occasionally pauses to contrast their mangled body parts to broken-down mannequins, re-aiming the satire back at the proper corporate target.  Obviously, it’s a film with a pronounced sense of humor about itself (often to its own detriment), so not all the killer-pants puppetry is thematically serious or grotesque.  It also makes time for the slacks to enjoy a solo Bollywood dance number (complete with a behind-the-scenes look at that gag’s practical puppetry) just to keep the mood light.  It’s adorable in isolation, but not adorable enough to pave over the more straightforward Jokes that simply just don’t land.

I’m usually not this harsh about films with premises this silly.  Just last year, I (mildly) praised a film called Aquaslash about a killer amusement park waterslide, and that only has one scene where the central gimmick pays off.  I really do think Slaxx is suffering from bad timing.  In any other era, its adorable killer-pants puppetry would’ve been enough to win me over.  There just have been too many excellent, high-profile examples of that exact gag in recent genre films for Slaxx to skate by on novelty alone.  It needed to be just a little funnier or just a little more politically focused to stand out in the growing crowd of Killer Fashion horror comedies.

-Brandon Ledet

Episode #131 of The Swampflix Podcast: Gosford Park (2001) & Bob “The Madman” Balaban

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Welcome to Episode #131 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Britnee, James, and Brandon discuss the underappreciated genius of Bob Balaban’s career behind the camera, ranging from the prestige ensemble-cast drama of Gosford Park (2001) to the Lynchian horror comedy of Parents (1989).

00:00 Welcome

01:51 The Toy Story franchise
06:55 The Last Blockbuster (2020)
09:25 Jasper Mall (2020)
14:10 Dead Illusions (2021)
18:50 Bad Trip (2021)
25:00 Another Round (2020)
29:45 Tenet (2020)
32:55 Sound of Metal (2020)

38:00 Gosford Park (2001)
54:30 Parents (1989)
1:06:50 My Boyfriend’s Back (1993)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Podcast Crew

Hannibal Rising (2007)

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I went into Hannibal Rising with pretty low expectations. Not only was it the most critically reviled of the film adaptations of Thomas Harris’s novels, with a Rotten Tomatoes score of 16%, but it was also the only one of them to feature no actors from previous versions, as it is a prequel set during our favorite cannibal’s childhood and early adulthood. Hannibal Lecter himself is the only character we have met before who appears here. Still, I thought that it might be one of those instances in which there was a worthwhile film in all of this that was merely “bad” in comparison to the rest of the franchise. Unfortunately, despite a couple of strong performances and some great European shooting locations, Rising is still a miss. 

The film opens in the surprisingly happy Lecter household in Lithuania during WWII in 1941. The Lecters are apparently aristocrats, as we see they live in a fairly large castle, which they depart in order to move further from the advancing German lines and take up residency in the family’s hunting lodge. The 1944 Soviet Baltic Offensive pushed the Germans back, although a German plane destroys a tank near the Lecter’s lodge on its way out, killing everyone but an elementary aged Hannibal and his sister, Mischa. Shortly thereafter, the lodge is discovered by six deserters, including their leader, a Nazi collaborator named Vladis Grutas (Rhys Ifans) who convinced the others to join him, although their defection proved to be in vain as the war started to turn. Once supplies dwindle down to nothing, the six men kill and eat little Mischa, justifying their decision by claiming that she was sick and malnourished and would soon be dead anyway. When Hannibal tries to stop them, one of the men breaks his arm and the boy blacks out; when he regains consciousness, he is discovered by a group of Soviets, who find him wearing the shackles of his captors and mute from the trauma. 

Eight years later, Hannibal (Gaspard Ulliel) is once again living in his childhood home, although Lithuania had come under Soviet occupation (as it would remain until 1990) and Lecter Castle had since been turned into an orphanage. Despite his muteness, he cries out at night for Mischa in his dreams, which makes him a target for bullying by an older boy who holds some authority in the group home. When the boy attempts to strike Hannibal, he simply raises a fork, which lodges in his bully’s fist. As punishment, Hannibal is locked in the castle’s dungeon, but he gets out through a secret passage that is unknown to the others, sneaks into what was once his mother’s bedroom and gathers some family documents, and escapes across the Soviet border into unoccupied lands, making his way to the home of his late father’s brother in France. He arrives too late to reunite with his uncle, who has recently passed away, but is taken in by his widowed aunt, known only as Lady Murasaki (Gong Li). She shows Hannibal the first kindness he has experienced in a long time, which helps to rehabilitate him somewhat and even results in him once again regaining the will and ability to speak. She also shows him her family shrine, which includes a katana and her ancestor’s armor, and teaches him to swordfight. 

When Murasaki experiences racist harassment at the hands of a local butcher, Hannibal fights the man and is arrested, but is released to his aunt’s custody, as the man was a known Nazi collaborator and has few friends among the locals. Hannibal later tracks down and kills the man with the Murasaki family sword, decapitating him and presenting the head to Murasaki just as her ancestor had decapitated his enemies in the scrolls she shared with him. This, Hannibal’s first murder, is investigated by French Inspector Pascal Popil (Dominic West), who was made famous for his testimony about Nazi war crimes at Nuremberg. Although there’s little to exonerate Hannibal, when the butcher’s head is placed on a pike near the police station with a swastika carved into it while Hannibal is being interrogated, he is released. 

Eventually, Hannibal becomes the youngest student admitted to medical school in France, where he gets a student job preparing cadavers. Murasaki also moves to Paris, as the Lecter family estate is taken by the state due to arrears. At his Parisian school, Hannibal once again meets Popil, who is interrogating a war criminal using sodium thiopental; under the influence of the drug, the man seems to recall repressed memories. Seizing upon the opportunity to unlock his own forgotten memories of the men who killed Mischa, Hannibal drugs himself and recalls more of the events of his last days at the Lecter family hunting lodge and that he was saved by one of the men (Goran Kostić) who was killed by falling debris. Hannibal sneaks back into the country and returns to the lodge, pursued by Dortlich (Richard Brake), another of his former captors who has since become a border guard and recognized the Lecter name on the boy’s visa. Hannibal finds the entire group of deserters’ service tags in the lodge and, after capturing and torturing Dortlich into giving up information about the remaining four, kills him. 

Now armed with the names of his sister’s killers, Hannibal learns that one of them, Kolnas (Kevin McKidd) is living in Fontainebleau, part of the Parisian metropolitan area. Lecter finds the restaurant that the man now owns, accompanied by Lady Murasaki, and confirms the man’s identity; he now has his own family, which includes a young daughter who wears a bracelet that was once Mischa’s. The death of Dortlich has put the three deserters still living in Europe on alert, and Grutas, now a human trafficker, dispatches Milko (Stephen Walters) to kill Hannibal, but the latter kills the former by drowning him in embalming fluid. Popil also becomes invested in these killings and is suspicious of Hannibal, but after Murasaki is kidnapped and Hannibal kills Kolnas in his pursuit of Grutas, the boy apparently dies in either an explosion or the ensuing fire aboard Grutas’s boat as Popil and Murasaki watch. In reality, Hannibal had managed to slip away, making his way west to take his final revenge on the last living deserter (Ivan Marevich) in Canada before heading south to the United States, where he will eventually become the Chesapeake Ripper and, well, you know the rest. 

We don’t need a prequel explaining how Hannibal the Cannibal came to be the way that he is. I have a reputation, at least among my fellow contributors here, as the person who most wants an explanation or a resolution in my media, and I think that’s a fair assessment. I’m very much a systems thinker in a lot of ways, and that’s probably one of the reasons that I get trapped in the event horizon of Thomas Harris’s stories; despite being works that are just serial killer crime stories, they are nonetheless exquisitely crafted with great care, creating a lore that’s not “missing” from something like a Lincoln Rhyme novel, but is absent from them. On the other hand, I’ve long gone on record about my feelings that horror is best left unexplained. Terror that is inexplicable is terror that is its own exponential, and although I understand audience demand for more detail and backstory, as I often want the same when it comes to other genres, that doesn’t apply to someone like Hannibal Lecter. He’s just a well-educated serial killer with a talent for reading people very well, and that’s all that he needs to be. Although the NBC Hannibal series is also a prequel, as it explores the entwined personal and professional relationships between Lecter and Will Graham that are all prologue to the first appearance of Lecter on page or screen in Red Dragon, that’s not an “origin story” like this is, and our impressions of the Lecter character are harmed by this story, not enhanced by it. Even the revelation that Hannibal himself had eaten of the broth made from Mischa (and that he may unconsciously be seeking to kill all those who know the truth rather than truly seeking revenge for her) lands with a dull thud, as we in the audience have already assumed that Hannibal had done so, either unknowingly and learning the truth later or being too consumed by hunger to care in the moment, hence the repressed memories. 

A Hannibal Lecter who is just a brilliant European psychologist who uses his sophistication as a shield against scrutiny into his depraved cannibalistic urges, a Hannibal Lecter who effortlessly diverts any attempts to see past this shield by deflecting his interrogators’ questions and seeing through them to their deepest fears and insecurities; those are much more interesting characters than a Jokeresque Eurotwink strip-mall samurai seeking revenge. As ridiculous as that combination of words sounds all together, it’s still too grounded, in the sense that Hannibal should be a human so corrupted and warped by his desires that we can barely recognize his way of thinking as being like our own, who just happens to exist in a very down-to-earth, grounded FBI procedural. That’s the common element of all of the killers in this franchise, and that’s what makes it work. The Chesapeake Ripper, the Tooth Fairy/Red Dragon, Buffalo Bill: their compulsions and dark desires make them otherworldly, and even though we also know them as Lecter, Francis Dolarhyde, and Jame Gumb, that doesn’t make the fact that they could exist in our world any less scary. This Hannibal we can understand and even sympathize with. It just doesn’t work. 

Even taken on its own and out of the context of the larger franchise, the film fails as a simple vengeance period piece. The best sequence, in which Hannibal escapes over the Soviet line into unoccupied territory, occurs very early on in the run time; nothing that comes after it matches it for suspense and thrill, and that’s long before Hannibal’s first kill. Hannibal’s slayings are gruesome and joyless, but not scary, because Hannibal never kills anyone with whom the audience can sympathize or like. The “least” deserving of his victims is “only” a Nazi collaborator who slings crass, racially charged sexual epithets at Murasaki; everyone else he kills was complicit in the murder and consumption of a child… on top of being Nazi collaborators. The Hannibal of this movie is basically post-war Dexter (disclosure: I have never seen Dexter), a serial killer who only kills Nazis, cannibals, and human traffickers, which means he’d be the problematic hero of any other story instead of the villain protagonist we have here. That has the potential to be an interesting story, but Rising is not that narrative. 

Gong Li’s Lady Murasaki is the most out of place element here while also being the best. While Hannibal is static–violent, sadistic, clever, and remorseless–throughout, Murasaki is one of the only characters with an arc. She genuinely did love Hannibal’s uncle, and the loss of his estate weighs heavily on her, especially as she comes to realize that the young man she took into her home as the last living connection to her husband has put her in a precarious position. She still genuinely loves Hannibal as well, in spite of his violent tendencies, but as much as she wants to be the chain that binds him to a kind of morality, bearing witness to his viciousness forces her to realize that she can’t change him into something that he’s not. Gong’s performance is nuanced, thoughtful, and subtle, and I wish we saw more of her in other films. Gaspard Ulliel was widely praised when the film was released; any review that is positive specifically cites his performance, but I wasn’t enamored. Ulliel is a good actor, but here he’s all sneer and no substance. This isn’t just in comparison to the other versions of Lecter that we’ve seen; although Rising predates X-Men: First Class by four years, the latter film has a spiritual similarity in the way that Magneto tracks down several Nazis who escaped justice and kills them. In that film, our vengeful killer is unrelenting in his pursuit of his goals, as is Hannibal here, but Michael Fassbender brings an undercurrent of ambiguity to Magneto that is not just absent in Ulliel’s Lecter, but missing. I do think that Ulliel would probably make a fantastic Joker, though, if any filmmaker were brave enough to take that chance. 

This was a fairly difficult movie to track down, although if you can trick Netflix into thinking you’re in Germany (wink wink), you can find it on their service in that country. It’s not really worth the trouble, though. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Red Dragon (2002)

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As I wrote in my Manhunter review, that film was only the first of three different adaptations of Thomas Harris’s novel Red Dragon. Although Manhunter spent a long time as a semi-forgotten also-ran, I’m guessing that producer Dino De Laurentiis knew that he had failed to strike while the iron was hot by letting ten years pass between the releases of Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal, and he knew he needed to get Red Dragon into theaters before said metaphorical iron was ice cold. Coming out a mere 20 months after Hannibal, Red Dragon opens with the scene we only heard described in Manhunter: Will Graham (here played by Ed Norton), after seeking help from notable psychologist Hannibal Lecter (still Anthony Hopkins) in finding the so-called Chesapeake Ripper, suddenly realizes that the serial killer whom he is pursuing isn’t keeping trophies like most, he’s eating them. Graham has his revelation that Lecter is the Ripper while sitting in the older man’s home, and, drugged, manages to survive his altercation with Lecter, who is taken into custody. From there, we learn via opening credits newspaper montage that Graham spent a fairly lengthy period recovering from being stabbed by Lecter, followed by a not-insubstantial period of time in a mental facility as a result of his pronounced and unusual talent for empathy with those he profiles, which is plot relevant here as it was in Manhunter. 

Several years later, Will is now married to Molly (Mary-Louise Parker) and living with her and his stepson Josh in Marathon, Florida, when Jack Crawford (Harvey Keitel) appears to ask him to help with the profile of an emerging serial killer menace, nicknamed The Tooth Fairy. Hitting a roadblock, Graham must consult with his previous partner/prey to once more access the mind of the killer. Elsewhere, Francis Dolarhyde (Ralph Fiennes) is a man struggling with severe mental problems resulting from a lifetime of horrific abuse and violence at the hands of his grandmother, who was his guardian. As a result of a childhood cleft palate issue that has long since been addressed with reconstructive surgery, Dolarhyde perceives himself as horribly ugly, but he also constantly works out to deal with the aggressive nature of his flashbacks to his childhood traumas, acquiring a physique that all of his so-inclined coworkers find pretty attractive. We also learn that Dolarhyde and Lecter have managed to strike up a correspondence through personal ads in the National Tattler, the tabloid that employs Freddie Lounds (Phillip Seymour Hoffman), a sleazy reporter against whom Graham has a personal grudge due to Lounds’s invasion of Graham’s hospital room following his altercation with Lecter, photographing and publishing the profiler’s wound. 

This film follows almost all of the stations of the Red Dragon canon. Lecter manages to get information about where Graham lives, and he passes this off to Dolarhyde.  Dolarhyde is revealed to hate the name “Tooth Fairy,” considering it derogative and an insult to the great Red Dragon (of William Blake’s poems and paintings) that he is becoming through the “changing” of his victims. Graham attempts to bait Dolarhyde by planting false information in the news via leaking “embarrassing” fabricated details from the FBI profile to Lounds, but instead of going after Graham as intended, Dolarhyde kidnaps Lounds instead and uses his burning body to send a message to Graham and Crawford. Molly and her son are whisked away to a safe location after the FBI realizes that Lecter’s latest personal ad/message to Dolarhyde included information about how to find Graham. The Red Dragon personality starts to lose its power over Dolarhyde when he meets and strikes up an odd relationship with blind photodeveloper Reba (Emily Watson), although when he misinterprets an innocent, friendly interaction between Reba and another colleague, the Dragon begins to reassert itself. Just as in the previous adaptation, Graham deduces that the Tooth Fairy gained intimate details about the families he killed (like being able to identify the family pet or knowing to bring a pair of bolt-cutters for a padlocked door) through both surveillance and access to their home movies via his job at a company that develops, processes, and edits film. 

The film doesn’t diverge from the plot of Manhunter until Act III, when the FBI prepare to raid Dolarhyde’s home and find the place ablaze with Reba trapped inside. She relates that Dolarhyde shot himself in the face, as she heard the shot and accidentally touched his skull (etc.) in the aftermath. There’s no fire in Manhunter, and in that film Dolarhyde’s reign of terror ends with Graham defeating him in his home and returning from the episode at Dolarhyde’s to a happy family reunion at the beach. Here, Graham, Molly, and Josh are reunited, yes, but it turns out that Dolarhyde had staged his death using Reba as his unwitting accomplice through corroboration of his death, and he takes Josh hostage. Through berating the boy using the same language that was used to abuse Dolarhyde for so many years, Graham is able to force Dolarhyde to empathize with the boy and release him, and Dolarhyde is ultimately killed by Molly. And they lived happily ever after, as long as you ignore the canon from the books, and also that we know Hannibal’s imprisonment isn’t forever. 

What Red Dragon does have going for it is the best version of both Molly and Dolarhyde. Tom Noonan’s performance as Dolaryhyde in Manhunter is nothing to scoff at, but that film brought Dolarhyde into the narrative very late in the runtime; not only is our time with him and his relationship with Reba rushed, but Manhunter also opts to cut the Dolarhyde death fake-out completely and instead end the film with the FBI raid on Dolarhyde’s home, meaning that we don’t get the scene in which Dolarhyde confronts Graham and his family in Florida. That also means that Molly has almost nothing to do in Manhunter, although one of the few good Molly scenes in the 1986 film is missing here: there’s a great atmospheric scene in Manhunter after we have just learned that Lecter has managed to get Graham’s address and send it to Dolarhyde, when Molly and Kevin (not Josh) are in the Graham home and there’s some misdirection that implies that they’re in immediate danger, before it turns out to be the FBI, come to spirit them away to a safe house. By that point in the narrative in this film, the audience has already seen Dolarhyde and knows what he looks like, and it wouldn’t make narrative sense for that film to appear here. Instead, Molly gets to have her big scenes in the finale, which I like. 

It had been nearly ten years since I saw Red Dragon, and having now seen so many different versions of Jack Crawford, I wasn’t sure I would be able to accept Harvey Keitel as the stern but affable FBI director, but that wasn’t the case here. You think of Keitel and you think about Reservoir Dogs, Taxi Driver, and Bad Lieutenant, of characters that err towards aggressive, corrupt, and sleazy. He’s actually rather good playing against type here, and although he’s still the worst version of Jack Crawford, it’s only because the other versions of him are done with so much more aplomb. The weak link in the cast is Norton, whose Graham isn’t vulnerable so much as he is pathetic. When he’s arguing his case to Molly that Crawford needs him to stop the next of the Tooth Fairy’s killings, he doesn’t sound like he believes himself so much as he is simply doing as he’s told by whoever got in the last word by the sole virtue of being the last person to speak. Although this Lecter is once again different from his foppishly eccentric characterization in Hannibal and his brief-but-resounding reptilian inhumanity in Silence, I like him here. The opening scene shows us Lecter in his element as a member of elite society, making puns about symphony and haute cuisine and holding court over all of his social peers while also secretly feeding them a musician who failed to meet his standards. Given that they center around a character called “Hannibal the Cannibal” there’s very little actual cannibalism in any of these films, with only a little Paul Krendler brain saute at the end of Hannibal, so it’s also nice to see him doing his thing here; the NBC Hannibal series would manage to (ahem) make a meal out of scenes like this every week, and it’s delightful. 

This is the last we’ve seen of Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal to date. He’s presumably still out there in this continuity, albeit he’d be extremely aged (Hannibal Rising presents him as a child of nine or so during the end of WWII, so he’d conservatively be 83 at this point). Although the Hannibal TV series has already given us an unforgettable modernization of this story, I’d be lying if I said I wouldn’t be first in line for a present day feature in which an older Will Graham, now long retired, is approached by Director Starling and asked to work one last profile, and finally bring Hannibal Lecter back to justice once and for all. I’d prefer it if Graham were played by William Petersen and Starling was Jodie Foster, but I’ll take what I can get, even if it’s just a fanfiction out there (please note: I will not be reading any fanfiction). Don’t bother with this one unless you’re a completist; just watch Manhunter instead. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Hannibal (2001)

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Of course, I couldn’t just leave it at finally watching Silence of the Lambs or rewatching Manhunter. I cannot explain it, but every time I get within a mile of the, for lack of a better term, Thomas Harris serial killer lore, I get completely sucked in. It’s not even about Hannibal Lecter for me; he clearly became the most popular character, as the post-Silence novels and their film adaptations bear his name—not Will Graham’s or Clarice Starling’s—in their titles, and the NBC show was titled Hannibal for a reason (the current, brand new Clarice series on CBS aside). For me, Hannibal himself is such a small part of a larger interconnected web of behavioral analysts, hospital staff, reporters, forensic scientists, and associated spouses, friends, and victims. Although he’s the thing that sticks out and looms large in the public consciousness of this series, the Chesapeake Ripper is still only a part of what makes for an incredibly engaging whole. 

Ridley Scott‘s 2001 film Hannibal, based on Harris’s 1999 novel of the same name, is generally pretty poorly regarded. Although Rotten Tomatoes is obviously a dubious metric, it’s the second lowest ranked of all of the Harris film adaptations there at a “rotten” score of 40%, beating only 2007’s Hannibal Rising‘s meager 16%; it’s easily surpassed by the certified fresh 93% and 96% respective scores for Manhunter and Silence of the Lambs as well as as adequate and accurate 68% summation for the tepid Red Dragon (2002). It had been a very long time since I saw Hannibal, and even that viewing had been on television (with its already bloated 132 minute runtime further expanded to accommodate commercials), so my recollections of it were both fuzzy and not very fond, so down the rabbit hole I went. 

After (spoiler alert for a 30 year old movie that’s arguably one of the five most iconic films of the first half of the nineties) Hannibal’s escape from custody in Memphis and his flight from the country at the end of Silence, Dr. Hannibal Lecter has essentially settled in Florence and taken on the identity of one Dr. Fell, curator and caretaker of a breathtakingly beautiful old school library, with the implication that Lecter killed the man who had the position before his arrival. The detective overseeing the investigation into the disappearance of the previous caretaker, Rinaldo Pazzi (Giancarlo Giannini), suspects Lecter, but has no proof. Stateside, it’s been ten years since Clarice Starling (now played by Julianne Moore, taking over for Jodie Foster) captured Jame Gumb, aka “Buffalo Bill,” and despite her obvious talent and a career-making rescue of a senator’s daughter, she’s still being held back by sexism within the FBI, both overtly and subtly. While overseeing a drug bust, she spies that one of their suspects has a baby in a child carrier and calls off the raid, but her orders are ignored by a local dick-swinging detective who previously gave her some light misogynistic backtalk, committing the whole squad to a deadly shootout that endangers an infant. 

Elsewhere, paralyzed and disfigured child molester Mason Verger (Gary Oldman), attended by his put-upon personal physician Cordell (Željko Ivanek), is scheming. Verger is one of that exceptionally rare breed: a victim of Lecter’s who was left alive, although his condition is a result of Lecter’s questionable psychological ministrations. The details are rather lurid, but essentially, Verger’s dogs ate his face … after he carved it off while under the influence of drugs. Verger is ludicrously wealthy; in fact, he’s rich enough to have henchmen in different hemispheres, some of whom are solely devoted to training boars to devour a human being in preparation for his vengeance on Lecter. Back in Langley, Assistant Director Noonan (Francis Guinan) pulls Starling from field duty following the incident while her professional nemesis, a Justice Department official named Paul Krendler (Ray Liotta), hectors her during the entire dressing down. Verger, who understands Lecter’s motivations better than most, learns of this and pulls a few strings to get Starling reassigned to the pursuit of Lecter, correctly surmising that the cannibal psychologist’s fascination with the agent will prompt him to reach out to her; this also gives the FBI a chance to work on the optics of Starling’s recent failure and how it reflects on the organization, both by playing to her strengths and invoking the ghost of past success. 

Hannibal sends Clarice a taunting letter, on which he deliberately leaves a faint remnant of a bespoke hand cream, which allows Clarice to snag a few threads and track him down to Florence, but Verger’s gambit is also working almost too well. Inspector Pazzi is looking to land a huge payday to appease the expensive tastes of his younger wife, and against Clarice’s direct recommendation, he passes on the opportunity to arrest Lecter outright, instead gambling that he can turn the man over to Verger for the $3M reward. His greed proves to be his undoing, as Lecter kills him gruesomely and evades Verger’s men. Verger pays Krendel to plant evidence that Clarice is deliberately hindering her own investigation in order to raise suspicion of her motives, and Lecter returns to the states and toys with Clarice a bit before Verger’s stateside goons capture him. Clarice, ignored by her superiors, breaks into the Verger estate to arrest Lecter, but is shot before her rescue/apprehend plan succeeds. Verger’s boars find them, but they ignore Lecter, presumably smelling no fear on him, and instead attack an injured guard. Lecter suggests Cordell simply push Verger into the boar pit and blame it on Lecter himself, which the physician does, and Lecter escapes with Clarice back to her home, where she awakens to find her bullet wound tended and herself dressed for dinner. Downstairs, Lecter has since apprehended Krendler and, as a drugged and captive Clarice watches in horror, removes part of the dolt’s brains, gives it a little fry, and feeds it to him. Lecter, fascinated with what he sees of himself in Clarice, asks her to join him on the Dark Side, but she refuses and fights back, albeit with mixed success in her drugged state. Lecter once again escapes to dine another day, not that we ever see it, given that this is the last chronological appearance of the character in the film series. 

One would think that the film’s biggest stumbling block would be in the recasting of Starling, but that’s not really so. Foster’s performance as Clarice is absolutely legendary, but if one had to recast the character, I doubt that there was a better choice than Moore. Although there are moments where her affectation of the Clarice accent verges on overkill and calls to mind Moore’s 30 Rock character Nancy Donovan in its general broadness, she delivers a reliably solid performance that grounds Clarice as she navigates the shark-infested waters of institutional sexism and the equally turbulent plain of her own troubled conscience. The problems here aren’t with her performance, or Hopkins’s either. After a long time away, he plays Lecter a little less broadly here than in Silence, as while the character was certainly menacing there, it strained the credibility of the narrative that that Lecter could have ever pretended to be a normal person at all. With Lecter now living more understatedly in Florence, he can play off some of his more quirkier mannerisms as merely foreign behavior, and he’s believable as someone who is eccentric but doesn’t immediately set off “serial killer” alarm bells. This Lecter seems completely in his element, effortlessly preparing for every potential wrinkle in his grand design, but the irony is that this almost makes him seem less scary. In Silence, Lecter is literally imprisoned but he never seems cornered, he’s just biding his time. Here, it seems like Lecter could have stayed hidden for quite some time if he hadn’t decided to contact Clarice and leave his breadcrumb trail, but instead of living his life in freedom, he comes back around to taunt Clarice because he loves the drama, which could arguably be considered more fun, but that doesn’t inherently make it more interesting. 

Still, Foster’s absence looms large here, as does that of Jonathan Demme, who was invested in the idea of doing a sequel for a long time. Also gone is Ted Tally, who wrote the Silence screenplay. With Scott at the helm and an initial first draft of the screenplay written by David Mamet(!), one would think that the film was tee’d up for success, but not really. Even a mediocre sequel would have been a guaranteed success in, say, 1995, but by 2001 Lecter’s legacy had grown too expansive, like a cloud that has expanded and expanded but essentially become immaterial. You’d have been hard pressed to find anyone over the age of ten who couldn’t at least mangle the line about Lecter’s famous liver and fava bean dinner or do that little hiss thing, but that made him less menacing. From all reports, Harris took the whole thing in a bizarre direction in the book, wherein Clarice (albeit under the influence of drugs) accepts Hannibal’s invitation to let her hate flow through her, etc., and runs off with him in the end. Demme admitted that he simply couldn’t get his head around this idea, and Tally politely referred to both this plot development and the generally gorier nature of the Hannibal novel as “excesses.” I’d bet that also put Foster off of the project, although she’s always played it off that she was too busy working on Flora Plum, which you may have never heard of, since it’s still only a dream, and Foster has all but admitted that this was a convenient excuse. I imagine that if the film had followed that plot more, the reception would likely have been even worse, but no one gets to know what could have been. Then again, the best parts of the film are those that follow Lecter’s cat and mouse games with Piazza in Florence, as Scott makes great use of the city’s historic buildings and architecture to craft some beautiful shots, and Piazza’s increasingly risky attempts to get some evidence of Lecter’s identity are met with Lecter’s casually effortless countermoves. It’s genuinely fun, and it’s completely separate from just about everything having to do with Clarice; in the year of our lord 2021, post-Harry Potter, they’d probably split the book into two films, and the one about Lecter and Piazza would be the more compelling one. 

Personally, I wasn’t happy about the news media being villainized for how they portray the botched drug raid that’s pinned on Starling. The audience is supposed to cringe in sympathy with Clarice when a news anchor smarmily waxes on about the FBI’s tendency to use excessive force, because we in the audience know that it’s not her fault. In the real world, however, it’s been a decade since Silence, which was released mere weeks before the LAPD brutally beat Rodney King, marking one of the major turning points in the greater American discourse about police brutality. Even in Silence, when Clarice first enters Jack Crawford’s office, he notes that he picked her for the Buffalo Bill assignment because, during a lecture of his, she “grilled” him about the bureau’s well-known issues with civil rights issues. That blind disregard for the reality of law enforcement’s problems in our world lends the whole thing a lack of specificity; it doesn’t feel moored (no pun intended) to reality in the same way that Silence did. Also contributing to this general ambiguous vibe is the very pre-9/11 nature of its storytelling. I’m not just talking about how easy it is for Hannibal Lecter to trot the globe while also being on the FBI’s Most Wanted list (alongside Osama bin Laden, no less) and how he travels with a bottle of wine without the TSA taking that from him, I’m talking about the clumsy attempts at addressing the glass ceiling that Clarice is up against. Within a few months, the treatment of the FBI in our media was about to become extremely jingoistic for quite a while, and we’re still living in the narrative fallout. Consider, for instance, how Fringe differed from its spiritual predecessor The X-Files, which was itself partially inspired by Silence of the Lambs, in its treatment of the Bureau; in the former, the FBI is mostly a force for good, while in the latter, Mulder and Scully’s larger organization is riddled with obstruction and maliciousness at every turn. It would be a long time before we would see any nuance in stories about the FBI again, and now it’s handled with a more surgical approach (while also still mostly being uninspected in its uncritical treatment of law enforcement, which is bad), but it makes any interaction between Clarice and her colleagues with whom she has conflict feel blunt and careless. 

Ultimately, Hannibal is fine. It’s overstuffed, but the entire entertainment commentary industry is abuzz with talk about a superhero movie that clocks in at a solid 4 hours, so if anything, the world is more ready for this film now than it was twenty years ago. It’s been thirty years since we last (and first) saw Jodie Foster play Clarice Starling, not just ten, so it’s also easier to accept Moore in that role. The most surprising thing about it is that the Florence plot in this one may actually be better than the version in NBC’s Hannibal, at least in the sense that I could follow what was happening; Hannibal in Florence was that show at its most hallucinogenic, baroque, and convoluted, to its detriment, in my opinion. I’d still recommend it over this one as a whole, though. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond