“Breaking the Silence”, “Understanding the Madness”, “Inside the Labyrinth”, “From Page to Screen”, original 1991 featurette, deleted scenes, “Scoring the Silence”, Anthony Hopkins phone message, outtakes reel, TV spots, teaser and theatrical trailers ---

Baaaaaaa. Yep. It’s back but this time in a slightly underwhelming and slightly over processed presentation "The Silence of the Lambs” appears on Blu-ray. The surprise multiple Oscar winner arrives cannibalizing the previous MGM edition on DVD with some new extras as well just to add that extra flavor the only thing it’s missing is Fava beans and a nice chianti. A brilliant thriller directed by Jonathan Demme, “The Silence of the Lambs” was followed by three inferior sequels over the last twenty years but hasn’t dimmed the suspense of this original thriller. “Lambs” influenced everything from “The X-Files” to “Twin Peaks” as well as many other procedural movies and TV shows. Usually when a movie has that much impact it dilutes its sense of originality. That hasn’t happened here as Demme’s film is just as intense, sharp, witty and involving as it was over twenty years ago due to the terrific writing, direction, photography and acting. This is the fourth go round by my count of “Lambs” (not counting VHS) including two previous releases of the film from MGM and a Criterion edition. ***

Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster in her Oscar winning role)a young cadet at the FBI is one of the sharpest at the Academy although she’s far from perfect. When one of her supervisors at the FBI (Scott Glenn)robes her in to get her perspective on a serial killer case dubbed “Buffalo Bill” (Ted Levine) by the press (because he skins his victims). He has her interact with serial killer Dr. Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins in his Oscar winning role)a manipulative, brilliant psychiatrist who ate his parts of his victims because “she’s his type”. The FBI suspect that Lecter has been communicating with “Bill” and, in fact, knows his identity. Suddenly Clarice finds herself in a chess game involving human life as the clock ticks and “Bill” claims another victim—this time the daughter of a prominent member of congress woman. Starling also finds herself fighting against the director of the mental hospital for the criminally insane who wants to break Lecter for his own reasons. ---

Image & Sound:

There was some debate on the internet about “The Silence of the Lambs” looking over processed where skin textures were waxy, etc. like Fox’s horrible transfer of “Patton”. That was a bunch of B.S. -“The Silence of the Lambs” features a transfer that looks nice although its clear that it was sourced from the same 2 disc DVD set released last year. . The overall look of the film preserves the muted color scheme that director Demme and D.P. Tak Fujimoto favored for the original film. The Criterion which was one of the first transfers to digital video out there looked decent, the MGM was an improvement with textures and colors truer to the original intent of the filmmakers and this version comes closest to that original presentation as far as I can tell although it does use a slightly older MPEG2 transfer. The result is that the image quality while superior to most of what has come before isn't optimized for high def. ***

Audio sounds extremely good with a nice 5.1 mix that echoes the original MGM and Criterion DVD and a nice DTS presentation as well. My only complaint is that the audio isn’t presented in uncompressed TrueHD audio but the DTS-HD is a good close second. ---

Sadly, we don’t get Demme’s original commentary track which was the main attraction of the inferior (and earliest)DVD transfer of the film by Criterion. Luckily we don’t get the creepy written extracts from the diaries of REAL serial killers that was part of that package (which I always thought was a bit morbid and disturbing to present on home video). ***

What we do get is primarily the materials on the MGM DVD plus a couple of minor new items as well. “Into the Labyrinth” is a 2001 documentary on the film and is nicely complimented by the original 1991 “Behind-the-Scenes” featurette produced to promote this 1991 film. We also get the disturbing “Answering Machine Message”, outtakes reel, TV spots, teaser trailer and the original theatrical trailer all ported over from the previous 2001 release. ***

From the 2007 DVD release we get “Silence of the Lambs: From Page to Screen” a documentary that runs under an hour that was originally produced for Bravo network that dissects the long and arduous process a book can take to film. It’s amazing the amount of detail that Demme and writer Ted Tally went into in adapting Thomas Harris’ thriller to the screen from blueprints drawn up by the author for the original book to help him keep track of the physical action he was describing (which was used to help with set designs) to hearing plans from actor Gene Hackman to write, star and direct the film at one point before having to pull out. Deleted scenes are also ported over from the previous edition. Some deleted scenes are still missing if I recall correctly and I’m not exactly sure why. “Scoring the Silence” featuring composer Howard Shore (“The Lord of the Rings”) gives us insight into the composers approach to the material and why his score is so darned effect and creepy. ***

“Understanding Madness” is either new to this edition or is a featurette that was withheld from the previous edition of the film on DVD. It’s a solid glimpse into the mind set of individuals like Lecter and “Bill”. “Breaking the Silence” is a solid retrospective featurette on the making of the film that I don’t recall being on previous editions. What keeps this set from being complete are some of the interviews available on the previous set and the audio commentary by Demme from the Criterion. ---

Final Words: