NBC's 'Hannibal' Returns for Another Season. Mads Mikkelson & Hugh Dancy Outstanding, If You Can Stomach the Weekly Gore Fest

I'll admit that I enjoy horror movies, they're fun.  NBC's "Hannibal" is a one hour horror movie each week.  It's more like a blend of horror, suspense and crime.  What does that say about our society and myself for that matter that we enjoy watching shows that are so careless with human life?  Well, I don't speak for everyone, but if the ratings of the show were good enough to get picked up another season, the data speaks for itself.  Such disparagement and degradation of humanity unfolding visually in such a civilized and creepy way.  Is it a sign our society is crumbling or has horror like "The Walking Dead" and "Hannibal" become more accessible and mainstream since they're weekly shows and not bundled up in two hour Hollywood vehicles?  After all, horror movies have always been popular since the advent of movies, right?

"Hannibal" is riddled with many ironic gems, combined with the excellent psychotic symbiotic team of Hugh Dancy and Mads Mikkelson, all mixed together the ingredients really makes this show work.  I used "ingredients" kind of as a pun for what the show is centered around and that's food.  Human food.  Just kidding, but really, if this show is popular enough and it portrays such evil in such a civilized manner on prime time national television, what is the world coming to?

It's entertainment.

I mean, there are real sickos out there but yet, as entertainment, Hannibal features the worst mutilations, murders, sick, psychotic, grotesque, disfigurement and abuse of other humans and twists the souls of the victims and to some extent, the souls of viewers. There's a mild tone and always hints of cannibalism in each episode.  The audience knows Hannibal Lector is a sick man.  We know the gourmet meals he is preparing for himself and guests during an episode are actually human flesh.  We're kind of bystanders to his sick joke of introducing human flesh to the unsuspecting, violating their trust and friendship -- perhaps this is the most sinister actions after the actual murders of his victims?!  Yet, Mads Mikkelson is such a sympathetic character, despite his slightly porcelain rigidity and social awkwardness.  He is sometimes childlike -- perhaps he knows not what he's actually doing.  Yes, he is a brilliant doctor.  Yes, he likes to eat parts of people that he keeps in his freezer.  He's still a likable cannibal who has managed to live fairly normally in modern society and became a renowned psychologist.  He's adjusted much like vampires have adapted to blend into our society in other fictional stories.

Are we all really that desensitized?!  Okay, some may argue, it parallels the moral decay of our society.  Blah blah blah.  Lighten up, when Anthony Hopkins jumped off the screen as Hannibal and slowly sauteed Ray Liotta's brains in the second Hannibal, sure we cringed, but unlike vampires, sophisticated cannibals could be real and that's what makes cannibals like Lector really scary.  It makes you think if you meet someone too refined that perhaps they are a cannibal.  I mean, there must be something wrong with them, right?  No one's perfect.  You might even question the roast beef the next time you're over a "friend's" house.  Ask yourself -- do you really know them?!  :-)

"Hannibal" is not perfect, but it's a good dish... if you have the stomach for it.  I better end this review because I can just write until my hand literally falls off with bad puns about "Hannibal".  I'll put you out your misery by ending it now.