A mixed-bag movie franchise comes to a disappointing end (or at least one assumes) with Hannibal Rising, a prequel tale of literature and film’s most beloved cannibal. The movie follows Thomas Harris’ book so closely, once wonders if he didn’t write them simultaneously. But it just goes to show that a writer who excels in one medium isn’t necessarily going to excel in another; what worked there falls flat as a day-old Coke here.

The oddly named and miscast Gaspard Ulliel plays the young Hannibal, orphaned after Nazis kill his parents and out for the blood of the soldiers who slaughtered and ate his little sister eight years prior. Stepping into a role made famous by Anthony Hopkins is no easy feat, but Ulliel doesn’t have anything going for him but the ability to cop an evil sneer. He neither sounds nor looks like Hopkins’ take on the character. In fact, if we’re going to play dopplegänger, he most resembles Saturday Night Live alum Ana Gasteyer.

The only scenes that resonate are those in which Hannibal exacts his revenge, and we’re made to cheer him along. Yet they’re not built with any shocks; they simply go through the motions. And what to make of his third-act transformation into Action Hero, leaping atop ships to save Gong Li? At least on the page, scenes like this can’t look silly.

Director Peter Webber’s film at times looks beautiful, almost classier than a genre exercise like this should. I’m sure when Jonathan Demme lensed The Silence of the Lambs, he had no idea it would nominated for an Academy Award, much less take home the top five, but Webber and company act as though they’re intending on a sweep. In going so serious, Rising lacks any sense of diabolical fun that so endeared us to Lecter before, no matter the medium. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

Christopher McQuarrie, Oscar-winning screenwriter of The Usual Suspects, made his directing debut with — now here’s a step up! — a thriller, centered on two low-life criminals. For The Way of the Gun, he wisely cast Benicio Del Toro as one of them and unwisely cast Ryan Phillippe as the other. I take issue with the latter’s casting because: a) he looks girlie, and b) he attempts an accent that is just so wrong and distracting, mainly because he’s invented his own new accent altogether!

Anyway, while donating sperm, they hear of a woman (Juliette Lewis) who is being paid big bucks by a multimillionaire family to carry their child. Hearing that little “ka-ching” in their head, they kidnap her and hold her ransom for something like $15 million. Of course, things don’t go as smoothly as they planned, because otherwise, this would be a short subject. And maybe it should have been.

On their tail are Taye Diggs and Nicky Katt as Lewis’ expensive-suit-wearing bodyguards. Also on their tail is James Caan, who never once moves his neck. Also also on their tail is Geoffrey Lewis, for reasons that simply clutter up what should have been a simple story. And we haven’t even gotten to the cops.

After a strong start (albeit containing more utterances of “fuck” than the entire running time of Next Friday) and a painfully slow middle, Gun reaches a less-than-rousing conclusion in a whorehouse shootout, with bullets a-flyin’ as a doctor performs an emergency C-section on Lewis. At least I haven’t seen that before. Not that I want to see it again. No Way. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

One has to love how direct The French Sex Murders is, not only in title, but making good on that title. Viewers will get healthy doses of all three things in B producer Dick Randall’s shot at a giallo. Heck, the opening of a man leaping from his death (partly rendered in crude cartoon) from atop the Eiffel Tower is even repeated at the end. What scenery!

And I don’t mean just the Eiffel Tower, either, because much of the film is set in an exclusive Parisian brothel headed by Madame Colette (Anita Ekberg, La Dolce Vita). One of its hottest whores (Barbara Bouchet, Don’t Torture a Duckling) is discovered murdered, and her last client (Peter Martell, Death Walks at Midnight) is fingered for the crime. He accidentally beheads himself fleeing the police, yet the call-girl killings do not stop with his grisly death.

Inspector Pontaine (Humphrey Bogart lookalike Robert Sacchi, in his debut) continues to hunt for the real killer, taking him from the bosom of Lady Frankenstein‘s lovely Rosalba Neri to the laboratory of Professor Waldemar (Howard Vernon, The Awful Dr. Orlof), who proposes an intriguing theory.

The mystery is so easy to crack, it hardly qualifies as one. But that’s not the point; a giallo is less about the killer, and more about the kills. Director Ferdinando Merighi likes his so much that he shows you the exact same shot of the violent act in several times’ succession, but each in a different colored tint. He also shows you many women in the altogether nude, but keep in mind that some of them are French, which means their armpits match the drapes. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

Rather than being a straight (no pun intended) adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s classic novel, Italy’s The Secret of Dorian Gray is credited as “a modern allegory based on the works of Oscar Wilde,” whose name the characters even drop. Ditch the Picture of Wilde’s title; give the greedy protagonist a Secret. Even more than one.

Set in London at the dawn of the ’70s, Dorian (Helmut Berger, The Damned) is a well-off, but level-headed 21-year-old who seems to have it all. He’s fallen in love with a virginal actress (Marie Liljedahl, The Seduction of Inga), doesn’t want for money, and enjoys his youthful good looks, which are freshly captured on an oil painting done by an artist pal (Richard Todd, Stage Fright).

When an arrogant art buyer (Herbert Lom, the Pink Panther franchise’s seven-time Dreyfus) admires the work and its shirtless subject, he notes, “one day, you will become an old and hideous puppet.” A suddenly overly vain Dorian responds that he wishes he could stay forever young while the painting ages, and lo and behold, that’s what happens … provided he delights in vice and immoral activity. The more he humps — no regard to either gender — the older his canvas visage gets, to the point where it resembles a zombie from an EC cover of Tales from the Crypt.

This is one big Piccadilly Circus version of an 1890 tale that only could have been made when it was, at the peak of the sexual revolution (just before the birth-control pill became available for all in the UK), but before anyone ever heard of AIDS. A gay club is not-so-subtly named The Black Cock, but the actual depiction of sex is less graphic than what the movie’s controversy (and porno-theater bookings) would suggest. In its swingin’, groovy, right-place-at-the-right-time world, this Secret is the finest interpretation of that Picture I’ve seen. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

I’ve never seen a horror movie that makes me feel as anxious as having to walk past a group of unchaperoned teenagers, regardless of the situation or location. One on one, I have no problems with the adolescent set, but gathered together, I find they can be as terrifying as suddenly running into a pack of feral dogs. Hollywood has long understood the fear we “old fogies” have for those whippersnappers, and has been too happy to exploit it for excellent dramatic effect.

One of the best examples has to be Mark Lester’s Class of 1984, which has nothing to do with George Orwell’s book, but everything to do with all things awesome. In it, Perry King (TV’s Riptide) plays a handsome music teacher assigned to an urban hellhole of a high school controlled by a gang of psychopathic students whose extracurricular dabbling in drugs and prostitution are really just an excuse to indulge in what Alex DeLarge liked to call “a bit of the old ultraviolence.”

It takes about one class for King to get on the bad side of these ruffians, led by a gifted maniac played by Timothy Van Patten (Master Ninja). Unable to get any help from the school’s useless principal, the feud escalates an innocent student (a young Michael J. Fox) is stabbed and King’s pregnant wife is raped. King then proceeds to (understandably) freak the fuck out and go all Charles Bronson on the young punks’ asses in an insane showdown that’ll have you screaming “Fuck yeah!” more times than an unimaginative porn star faking her way to fame and fortune.

Definitely the best revenge flick from the ’80s that doesn’t star Linda Blair, Class of 1984 not only does for teenagers what Jaws did for oceans and Psycho did for showers, but it features a great performance by Roddy McDowell as another teacher pushed over the edge by his rowdy pupils, as well as a memorable theme song written and performed by Alice Cooper. —Allan Mott

Buy it at Amazon.