Movie Review - Hannibal Rising (no, really, quite funny, and not written by me)

[andrewducker]

Written, in fact, by Symon from work, whose website you can find at www.ferretpossum.com

Things in the shadows are scary. Anyone who has ever been a child in a darkened bedroom at 2am knows this. Unspeakable creatures lurk in the corners of the room - growling, creeping, snapping things with many teeth and red eyes... That is, until you shine a torch on them.

7 YEAR OLD ME: Wait a minute! You're not a monster at all! You're just a pile of underpants!
UNDERPANTS: We've been rumbled! Abort! Abort!

What I'm trying to say is that when you bring scary things into the light, they inevitably become less scary. Which is why "Silence of the Lambs" was such scary film, while "Hannibal Rising" is just a pile of underpants. I don't know about you, but hearing Hannibal's reasons for being a demented cannibal robs him of his mystique. Where he was once pure evil, he's now just a mixed-up chap, reliving unpleasant events from his past. Also, he's been rewritten as some sort of psycho avenger who targets only baddies, not the arbitrary monster he was in Manhunter who went after nice chap Will Graham and his family just for larfs. Which is sort of cheating I feel.

Hannibal Rising is stylishly done and does its best to appear well-written. But it's a movie that makes you think, "What was the point of that, then?" Other than to add zeroes to Thomas Harris' bank balance, that is. 3/10

UNDERPANTS: This is red leader to Y-front-one. The socks have stolen his torch! Repeat, the socks have obtained the torch! Attack formation! Tora! Tora! Tora!

Comments

[laserboy.livejournal.com]

He's a Ripley-esque hero in the film. It was quite fun (after the pub).

[trav28.livejournal.com]

The book felt massively underwritten (Hannibal, that is). I think the Lecter books have gotten progressively worse - Red Dragon is still the best book imho as Lecter is not Freddy Krueger or Chucky. I remember reading Red Dragon and feeling my skin crawl during the understated moments between Lecter and Graham, even the movie Manhunter captured the frisson better than any of the other cinematic attempts.

What is it about society that seeks to treat monsters and scum as "heroes", take for example Freddy Krueger, child molester, out and out evil scum bag then they feed him some one liners and he becomes a barbecued Eddie Murphy.

[chuma.livejournal.com]

Amusing, but still a piss poor review. It is not and never was meant to be a horror film, gods knows why it is being reviewed as one. It is an entertaining thriller that is out to explain how the monster came to be. 6 or 7/10 would be a fair score. 3 is laughable.

[makyo.livejournal.com]

I never bothered going to see Hannibal Rising, but I did go and see Hannibal, and considered it to be the joint (along with Dungeons & Dragons) worst film I saw in 2001. Whereas in Manhunter and The Silence of the Lambs Lecter was an interesting, complex character whose motives and motivations were unclear (albeit influenced in part by a sense of aesthetics - he takes time out to listen to the Goldberg Variations after crucifying a prison guard, and at some point he mentions murdering a substandard cellist, for example), in Hannibal he'd been reduced to a two-dimensional cardboard villain relying solely on shock and gore for what effect he'd been left with. Very disappointing, and left me uninterested in going to see either Hannibal Rising or Red Dragon.

[themongkey.livejournal.com]

Ditto, except the trailers for Hannibal saved me from getting that far.

I can only assume Gong Li did Hannibal Rising in order to keep some negatives somewhere from coming to light.