Have the Audiences Stopped Screaming?

Silence of the Lambs is one of those movies, like Chinatown or The Exorcist, that I wish I'd never seen—so I could see it for the first time. The close second is seeing it with someone who never has, so I can relive my initial response (in somewhat diluted form) in the inevitable wince of shock-horror. Still, I can't help hoping, each time a sequel or prequel comes out—Hannibal, Red Dragon, and now Hannibal Rising—that lightning will strike twice and I'll be taken back to that night at my grandparents' house when I turned on the TV and found a slightly bowdlerized but nonetheless terrifying movie that I probably wasn't supposed to watch and certainly wasn't about to turn off.

It's probably never to be. Hannibal and Red Dragon were massive letdowns, partly because they lacked Jodie Foster but mostly because they were so desperate to outdo the shock value of the original. Little did they know that shock value had nothing to do with it, as this review from the Telegraph puts so plainly:

Hannibal Rising piles on the crass psychology and torture scenes with a grim cackhandedness that makes it far worse than any of its predecessors – even Ridley Scott's widely derided Hannibal, which I enjoyed for its baroque luxuriation in Lecter's habitat, and the games it played with a cheek-munching aesthete resting on his laurels.

By contrast, this mechanical cash-in fails dismally, because it is impossible to see how Ulliel's creepy, gloating teenager might have grown up to be the great intellectual monster Anthony Hopkins gave us.

Like that census-taker whose liver he famously recalled eating in The Silence of the Lambs, it tries to explain Hannibal Lecter and gets absolutely nowhere.

An origin story is the second-to-last thing we need for a character as weirdly ageless and sui generis as Hannibal Lecter. The last thing we need is pointless gore, which is what movies rely on when they have a story thinner than pudding skin and half as palatable. So I think I'll pass on Hannibal Rising, and just be grateful that it'll supply critics with enough tasty one-liners to make it through the winter without starving.