Now, The Silence of the Lambs isn't really a favorite of mine. Just as Philadelphia tried so hard to be an AIDS movie for homophobes, The Silence of the Lambs will always be identified as a horror movie for people who don't like horror movies (and I love 'em). So I was pleased that Ridley Scott, who directed Alien, one of the moodiest, scariest movies ever made, would tackle the Silence sequel. Unfortunately, he was saddled with tough material -- a novel that read like a "fuck you" to Hollywood and Clarice Starling fans -- and never figured out a way to make it sing. (It's telling that this film's most effective moment is a simple cell phone call -- one that didn't exist in the book.)

While Silence had a strong quasi-feminist subtext, and tapped into the same zeitgeist plumbed later the same year by Scott's Thelma & Louise, Hannibal's subtext is, well, I don't know -- a fear of refined tastes and intellectualism? Anthony Hopkins plays the grim doctor here with Freddy Krueger relish, only occasionally nailing the speech patterns and attitude from the previous film, and the so-reliable Julianne Moore winds up being a poor surrogate for Foster's pluckiness.

All that said, I really did appreciate the hallucinatory tone of the climactic dinner sequence -- Ray Liotta's goofy smile, Moore's wild décolletage and all; if it had come at the end of a less dreary film, it would have qualified as a truly perverse achievement.