When Silence of the Lambs came out, the audience I saw it with did a standing ovation. It took me a full minute to realize they weren’t being sarcastic. As a response I immediately went home, took my Human Race Card out of my dresser, and wiped my ass with it.

I must have watched the thing six times, but I never saw the movie everyone else saw. What I saw was a boring piece of shit about a FBI agent who once ate twenty-six racks of lamb and never forgave herself for it. There’s a lot of talk in the movie about these two bad guys and how batshit dangerous they are, but instead of making the movie about that, they decided to film a prolonged therapy session instead. This is what happens when an intellectual tries to make a horror film. Descriptions of gore are nice, but not if you don’t whip out the goods every so often. Imagine a G-Rated movie about tits. Now raise your hand if you want to kick that movie in the nuts.

Okay, I know Hannibal the Manimal “Cannibal” kills a couple people and gets out of prison by wearing a guy’s face, but they show that scene on TV so it can’t be that great. If the only TBS-edited part of your horror movie is a penis-tuck shot, then you’re not making a horror film. You’re making a “beginner’s guide to private parts” for newlywed Christian couples.

When I saw Hannibal Lector at number one on a list of horror icons, I’d finally had enough. I sat down and wrote an angry little letter to America, and it was called Hannibal. I’d say it’s probably the best movie anyone has ever made except for me.

I sort of wanted to trick people into thinking this would be another pretentious piece of shit, so the first act of the film takes place in Venice. Hannibal is on vacation from killing people, and he spends that time admiring art, eating luxurious food, and banging the kind of girls who are attracted to college professors. A French detective starts tracking him down though, so Hannibal has to cut his vacation short. He puts a rope around the French guy’s neck and before he hangs him he cuts the guy’s French guts out and shoves them into his French mouth, while taking a couple bites for his Hannibal self. He pushes him out a window, but because he purposefully tied the noose wrong, the poor guy’s head just pops right off. The blood sprays seven stories up to where Hannibal is waiting with a ready to be filled flask. He winks at the camera and we love him.

We then meet a wheelchair bound guy named Scarface 2. He has no face because Hannibal once asked him to cut it off and eat it. I decided to give Hannibal superpowers in this movie and THE WORD OF GOD is one of them. Well, Scarface 2 is pretty good and pissed that he doesn’t have a face anymore, even though HE’S the one who did the fucking cutting and eating. Hannibal just watched and masturbated. Nevertheless, his Scarfaced ass wants to capture Hannibal and feed him to some pigs. Pigs like to eat people, so imagine their excitement when they find out they get to eat a person who’s guts are filled with already chewed people. To them, Hannibal’s kind of like a Hot Pocket.

Hannibal catches wind of this and goes to the pig pen. On the way, he finds twenty escaped convicts and convinces them to come along. While the pigs eat the convicts, he cuts the biggest pig open from groin to neck and makes sure all its organs fall out while it dies. Satisfied that he won’t get his suit messy, Hannibal crawls into his new pig disguise, which lets him walk all over Scarface 2’s mansion undetected. Once he finds Scarface 2 he hands him a razor and says, “Cut off your new Scarface and eat it.” Scarface 2 curses Hannibal a lot in between bites, but it doesn’t phase Hannibal because Hannibal’s heard it all before. When the whole face is eaten, Hannibal asks him to throw it all up. He puts the face puke in a pot and boils it up with some couscous. Little salt, little pepper, some EVOO. When it’s all cooked up he pours it into his flask and leaves, but not before pissing on what’s left of the guy’s face.

The FBI hears that their least-favorite Cannibal is back in America and they mean to take him down before he can talk anyone else into doing some crazy shit to themselves. They send in his girlfriend from the first film who is now played by Julianne Moore because Jodi Foster and I don’t get along (blame The Accused for that). As it turns out, that’s a pretty stupid idea. When she finally finds him, instead of saying: “You’re under arrest,” she says: “Um…my boss has really been a dick lately about paperwork. You think you can help me out with that?” Hannibal sighs and says, “Yes, but only cause I’m all out of facepuke stew.”

They hide out at Ray Liotta’s house and when he’s not looking, Hannibal cuts off the top half of his skull. He doesn’t feel it because it’s a well known medical fact that heads don’t have feelings. Hannibal starts cutting out pieces of his brain and cooking them on a hot plate, which I always thought was kind of adorable. My Grandma cooked on a hot plate and she was a real sweetheart. I don’t know what real human brains taste like, but the chimp brains we used for the film were pretty darn good. Julianne Moore didn’t want to try them because she’s vegetarian, but Liotta and I convinced her that brains were not actually meat and she finally gave in. That was pretty mean of us and I regret it.

He and his girlfriend start making out like crazy. She’s really clumsy though, and when she tries to handcuff her own kinky hands behind her back, she accidentally cuffs herself to Hannibal instead. All the sudden they hear police sirens coming towards them, and Hannibal’s gotta go! He looks at the handcuffs and lifts a meat cleaver. It comes down twice. Once to cut off her trapped hand, and one more to make her arms match. To say goodbye, he leans in for what she thinks is a kiss and bites off her nose.

Because he’s in a hurry, he lowers his standards a little and throws the hands into a microwave. He dances in front of it chanting like a child, “Come on, come on, come on!” When the FBI breaks through the front door, he quietly slips out the back and gets away. Criminal Mastermind.

On a plane back to Italy, he feeds an innocent kid some leftover Liotta brain and takes a nap. He has two dreams that involve time travel. In one, he goes back in time to when he first helped the FBI track down a serial killer. His second dream takes him back even further to when he first ate human flesh. They were both the worst, most ill-conceived nightmares ever.

(three stars)