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theamazingwolfman
Reviews
The Eyes of Charles Sand (1972)
I have really scary memories of this
I watched this when I was around 12 or 13 and it's the only horror movie that I've ever switched off because I was too afraid to watch it alone.
I want to watch it again; not because I'm particularly braver now, but I have a girlfriend who I can cuddle up to if I need to gibber and bite my fingers down to the knuckles.
Seriously, I'm not easily scared but this film nearly made me crap myself when I watched it. Maybe it'd be different now; I don't know. All I do know is that it's the most terrifying film that I've ever seen, even if that does come from the perspective of someone who only saw it as a kid.
Hannibal Rising (2007)
Not a masterpiece but well worth watching
On the whole I felt that it was easily the second best of the series.
Sure, some things aren't explained - Hannibal descends into violence, viciousness and cannibalism because of what happened to his sister, but throughout the film he still seems to have a moral compass, however skewed.
So how did he go from being someone killing purely for vengeance and a sense of justice (with the symbolic taking up of cannibalism along the way, of course) to killing and eating someone just because they were a little off in their musical performance, later on in his life? We just don't know.
What made it for me though, was the moral ambiguity. I grew up watching films about cowboys and indians, rebels and stormtroopers, etc. You always knew who the 'goodies' were. Not in this movie - monstrous though his acts might have been, the people who he killed were undeniably evil.
I often wondered what I would do in Hannibal's place, and I think that I'd probably go after them just as he did, although I'd make an exception in the case of the man with the daughter - maybe he'd genuinely changed, but the rest were just trash and killing them would prevent them from ever hurting anyone else.
I wouldn't eat them though (just in case anyone was thinking of tracking down my IP address and notifying Interpol). In the end, I like forgettable action movies as much as anyone, but this wasn't one of them - it was something that genuinely made me think and question myself sometimes.