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Red Dragon

The movie Red Dragon was based on the book Red Dragon.

Which one did you like better, the movie or the book?  There are 7 votes for the book, and 6 votes for the movie.

Movie details for Red Dragon

The movie was released in 2002 and directed by Brett Ratner, who also directed The Men's Club (1986), The Last Good Time (1994), Men (1997) and X-Men (2000). More information on the movie is available on Amazon.com and also IMDb.

Actors on this movie include Anthony Hopkins, Edward Norton, Ralph Fiennes, Harvey Keitel, Emily Watson, Mary-Louise Parker, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Anthony Heald, Ken Leung, Frankie Faison, Tyler Patrick Jones, Lalo Schifrin, Tim Wheater, John Rubinstein, David Doty, Brenda Strong, Robert Curtis-Brown, Mary Anne McGarry, Marc Abraham and Veronica De Laurentiis.

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Book details for Red Dragon

Red Dragon was written by Thomas Harris. The book was published in 1981 by Dell. More information on the book is available on Amazon.com.

Thomas Harris also wrote The Silence of the Lambs (1988) and Hannibal (1999).

 

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Lying on a cot in his cell with Alexandre Dumas's Le Grand Dictionnaire de Cuisine open on his chest, Hannibal "The Cannibal" Lecter makes his debut in this legendary horror novel, which is even better than its sequel, The Silence of the Lambs. As in Sile... Read More
Lying on a cot in his cell with Alexandre Dumas's Le Grand Dictionnaire de Cuisine open on his chest, Hannibal "The Cannibal" Lecter makes his debut in this legendary horror novel, which is even better than its sequel, The Silence of the Lambs. As in Silence, the pulse-pounding suspense plot involves a hypersensitive FBI sleuth who consults psycho psychiatrist Lecter for clues to catching a killer on the loose.

The sleuth, Will Graham, actually quit the FBI after nearly getting killed by Lecter while nabbing him, but fear isn't what bugs him about crime busting. It's just too creepy to get inside a killer's twisted mind. But he comes back to stop a madman who's been butchering entire families. The FBI needs Graham's insight, and Graham needs Lecter's genius. But Lecter is a clever fiend, and he manipulates both Graham and the killer at large from his cell.

That killer, Francis Dolarhyde, works in a film lab, where he picks his victims by studying their home movies. He's obsessed with William Blake's bizarre painting The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun, believing there's a red dragon within him, the personification of his demonic drives. Flashbacks to Dolarhyde's terrifying childhood and superb stream-of-consciousness prose get us right there inside his head. When Dolarhyde does weird things, we understand why. We sympathize when the voice of the cruel dead grandma who raised and crazed him urges him to mayhem--she's way scarier than that old bat in Psycho. When he falls in love with a blind girl at the lab, we hope he doesn't give in to Grandma's violent advice.

This book is awesomely detailed, ingeniously plotted, judiciously gory, and fantastically imagined. If you haven't read it, you've never had the creeps. --Tim Appelo