Dennis Hopper creates a monster more frightening than anything in The Silence of the Lambs as Paris Trout, a psychotic white bigot making a living as a storekeeper in the Georgia of 1949. When he feels gypped by a black sharecropper who's pranged the dud car Paris sold him and wants to claim the insurance (on which Paris intends to welch), Trout storms out to his home with a friend, both armed. There Trout goes berserk, shooting the man's kid sister dead and severely wounding his mother. When his wife (Barbara Hershey) expresses her horror, he attacks and humiliates her sexually, in a revoltingly graphic scene. She flees to the arms of his lawyer (Ed Harris) who is already becoming uneasy at defending Paris. Unrelentingly grim, the film is full of dingy, dust-filled rooms that make you wonder if the sun ever shone in this part of the post-war American South.


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