Modern Classic Movie Review: The Silence of the Lambs

I probably saw this movie sometime when I was in high school. I was fairly familiar with it and I found it pretty damn frightening. It's not quite a horror movie in the same vein as a slasher film, but I thought it worth including because it's a variation on horror and it was part of my childhood and youth.

Click here for a list of all other films reviewed and considered for this October 2012 series of horror reviews.

The killer's gaze is turned back on the audience, turning the power structure of the horror film around.

The Silence of the Lambs turns the serial killer and slasher film genre on its head by crafting the most compelling character not as the killer whom the FBI is hunting, but as the already convicted Hannibal Lecter, who sits in a basement cell and may have crucial information to help them catch their man. More remarkable than that is that everyone remembers Lecter as this imposing and frightening villain, a role that helped Anthony Hopkins win the Best Actor Oscar, but he is on screen for all of 16 minutes. That speaks to the power of seduction that he possesses.

Joy Ride Movie Review: Revisiting an Old Non-Classic

The director John Dahl had a fantastic start in feature films, making the neo-noirs Red Rock West and The Last Seduction back-to-back and then Rounders later. After a big-budget commercial fiasco in The Great Raid, Dahl has stuck mainly to television since 2005. He has directed several episodes each of “True Blood,” “Dexter” and “Californication,” all centered on subject matter that Dahl has been drawn to and executed quite well in his film career. It was mainly on the strength of his early work that drew me initially to Joy Ride, a fairly standard genre film that Dahl elevates slightly above the average thriller. Coming back to the film about a decade later, I’m somewhat disappointed, though not particularly surprised, to find it doesn’t hold up as well as I remember.