OxfordPress.com

By ELEANOR RINGEL
Cox News Service

"The Silence of the Lambs" is going to cause a sensation. It's the kind of movie you can't wait to tell people you've seen ... and survived.

Jonathan Demme's devastating version of Thomas Harris's chilling best seller is a knockout. The movie pulls you to the edge of your seat in its first minutes and never lets you sit back.

Oscar winner Jodie Foster stars as Clarice Starling, an FBI trainee handed a particularly difficult assignment by her boss, Jack Crawford (a buttoned-down Scott Glenn). He wants her to interview the infamous serial killer Dr. Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins), in his maximum-security cell.

Crawford thinks that Lecter -- also known as "Hannibal the Cannibal" for reasons that become evident in the film -- can help the Feds track down another mad murderer on the loose. He's a nasty piece of work dubbed Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine) by the press because he skins his female victims. "Do you scare easily, Starling?" Crawford asks. "Not yet, sir," she replies.

Famous last words ... or close enough. Lecter literally licks his lips when he sees what Crawford has sent him -- a pretty young woman he can toy with to his heart's delight. He'll help her find Buffalo Bill, he says, but only if she'll tell him about herself. He'll eat her soul if he can't devour her flesh.

The pressure on Clarice mounts when Buffalo Bill kidnaps a senator's daughter (Brooke Smith). Lecter's cooperation becomes crucial as time runs out for the imprisoned young woman.

Clarice's spine-tingling sessions with Lecter are the movie's stunning set pieces. Mr. Hopkins plays Lecter with a lunatic's gleam and a Karloff lilt. It's an astonishing performance -- a smiling psychopath who lasciviously sniffs out his visitor's cheap perfume and her steely ambitiousness. He's both mind-bendingly frightening and lethally appealing. And he knows he fascinates Clarice with his perverse brilliance and his dangerous bemusement.

Ms. Foster provides an expert counterpoint for her co-star's psychotic manipulations. She refuses to play victimized fly to his predatory spider, but she feels the terrifying brush of his web-spinning all the same. Every choice she makes is just right -- from the throaty twang of her West Virginia accent to the low-key intensity with which she goes about doing her job. She's tentative yet tenacious, vulnerable yet rock-solid.

Mr. Demme made his reputation by such offbeat, whimsically eccentric films as "Melvin and Howard," "Something Wild" and "Married to the Mob." There's virtually nothing in his work to indicate he could pull off something as menacingly coiled as "The Silence of the Lambs."

But he does much more than pull it off; he nails it cold. The director doesn't give an inch; at the same time, he doesn't give in to routine slasher tactics. What he does show us -- Buffalo Bill's basement Chamber of Horrors or what's left of Lecter's latest victims -- is plenty scary. But in the best tradition of great horror-thrillers, what he leaves unseen is absolutely petrifying.

Plus, he leavens the tension with a touch of macabre black humor. When Lecter points out that, unlike most serial killers, he never kept trophies of his victims, Clarice replies with a perfectly straight face, "No, you ate yours."

Before her first meeting with the not-so-good doctor, Clarice is cautioned by Crawford, "Don't tell him anything personal. You don't want Hannibal Lecter inside your head."

But that's just where this movie puts him -- right in there with Norman Bates and the rest of cinema's dark pantheon of legendary psychos. And that's exactly where he belongs.

"The Silence of the Lambs" gets under your skin and in your head. It's a bona fide classic of its kind.