The prospect of being serenaded by Hannibal Lecter is certainly more appealing than sitting down to dinner with him, at least to the noncannibals among us. Now, thanks to the composer-lyricists Jon and Al Kaplan, we can bask in the song stylings of one of the movies’ most famous mass murderers, in “Silence! The Musical,” an exuberantly gross spoof at Theater 80 in the East Village.

Don’t bring Grandma, please. Lecter’s principal aria in this “unauthorized parody” of “The Silence of the Lambs” is so vulgar it makes those naughty ditties in “The Book of Mormon” seem like trunk songs dropped from “The Sound of Music.” Inspired by a line of dialogue drawn directly from the Jonathan Demme movie version of Thomas Harris’s novel, it’s a song of yearning in which Lecter expresses a firm fixation on the genitalia of his F.B.I. interrogator-protégée, Clarice Starling.

As crooned with fine ardor by the Broadway veteran Brent Barrett, his robust voice caressing every expletive, it’s a hilarious takedown of the soaring ballads in bloated British musicals of the 1980s. Along with a chorus line of lambs, adorned with floppy white fur ears and tap-dancing hoofs, and the deadpan comic performance of Jenn Harris, who plays Clarice, it’s among the more subversively funny moments in this patchy evening, which feels stretched well past the point of inspiration at nearly two hours and a full two acts.

Musicals derived from egregiously unlikely movie sources have become a stock item at fringe festivals. “Silence!” was originally seen at the New York Fringe Festival in 2005. Hunter Bell, co-author and co-star of the do-it-yourself musical “[title of show],” wrote the book, and the direction and choreography are by Christopher Gattelli, who provided the dances for Broadway’s recent revival of “South Pacific.”

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The movie shellacked a thick layer of highbrow cinema gloss over fundamentally pulpy material, and was awarded with a pile of Oscars. I found it to be more grueling than enjoyable — although by the standards of today’s torture-porn thrillers it’s positively G rated — and was looking forward to seeing its grim self-seriousness punctured onstage. But “Silence! The Musical” rests a little too smugly on the sheer absurdity of its conceit, which is itself a little shopworn at this point. (Even the title inspires a yawn: the truncate-and-add-exclamation-point gag is pretty stale, guys.)

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There are some deliriously tasty (sorry) bits sprinkled throughout — did I mention those adorable little lambs, gamboling onstage during most of the musical numbers to offer choral support? — but overall “Silence!” feels like a by-the-numbers gag musical that doesn’t just fail to break any new ground but also covers its familiar territory with only sporadic flashes of ingenuity. It will be most enjoyable to rabid fans of the movie version, who can feast on the manner in which the Kaplans have set to song all the ickiest morsels of dialogue.