and Manhunter
were an early part of my dvd collection which at the time was probably 90% science fiction consisting mostly of red dwarf and futurama and when my book collection started to grow it didn't take to long for DR Lecter to turn up. he did however get ignored for some years and was left at the back of a filing cabinet a friend had help me liberate from a skip. so two or three months (or maybe six) after my brother bought me Hannibal rising i started to read red dragon.well i have just finished Hannibal rising and thought i would do a big Hannibal lecter review covering all fore books and all five films,
picking up red dragon after seeing all the movies was a little odd as the actors in my head kept changing places Brian Cox with Anthony Hopkins and William Petersen with Edward Norton, but as i got in to the book this soon stopped one of the things that hit me reading the book was the use of back story which is were Thomas Harris excels building up the characters and helping get inside there heads. this was kept to a minimum in the films and i for one am glad it was because flash backs can easily kill the mood of a movie
out of the two films based on red dragon my favorite is manhunter but i think this is for sentimental reasons. be for red dragon come out i had already seen manhunter numerous times and had grown comfortable with it's flaws like the over the top soundtrack,but i know deep down that red dragon is probably the better movie even with out iron butterfly
in silence of the lambs the subject of Hannibal's finger comes up. Hannibal left hand has an extra finger. i found this a bit gimmicky and pointless. but once something is in a story it's in and i find continuity important. Thomas Harris carefully included the removal of the tell tell digit in Hannibal but when we go back to hannibal's youth in Hannibal rising the finger goes unmentioned.
silence of the lambs doesn't differ much from novel to film with the exception of the illness and death of Bella Crawford. unlike hannibal were the book is much meatier than the film with more characters with more of there own lives including several characters from silence of the lams like Jack Crawford,Barney Matthews and Ardelia Mapp
and then there is hannibal rising when reading the previous books with there will written back story hope grew inside me that this would not be as bad as the movie but that hope soon died. it's far too detached from the other book and one of my biggest problem with this book is that Hannibal lecter gets arrested for murder but is let go after public outrage because the victims were war criminals with that on record his. you would think that the FBI's suspicion would of fallen on lector sooner for his later crimes.
and if the books bad the film is worse and always was going to be but this wouldn't stop Hollywood making it because they know there are a lot of people like me who wouldn't dream of having an incomplete collection no matter how shit the final installment is
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