Red Riding Hood

I came into the theatre of "Red Riding Hood" knowing that what I was about to watch wasn't going to be good.  Personally I was hoping for a "Twilight"-level humdinger of bizarre sexual fetishes, creepy implications, and the complete and total lack of a plot, making for a night of high laughs and good entertainment.  But sadly "Red Riding Hood" managed to completely disappoint by being too good.  This movie wasn't a wretched "Twilight 3.5", it was just a mediocre werewolf movie.  Not sexy enough, not scary enough, not stupid enough, just a blank nothing of cinema.

"Red Riding Hood" I think, probably more than any other movie before, is a perfect example of why horror movies can never ever have a rating of less than R.  This movie screams and squeals in tortured desperation while being chained down by its family friendly PG-13.  You can hear the script gasping for air as its lungs are crushed by the limitations its producers have set on it.  It can't be as bloody as it wants to be, it can't even have a single shot of nudity, come on!  There even isn't a scene of a person transforming into the werewolf, making this a really pointless and stupid movie.  So instead, in what seems to be an eleventh hour script rewrite, a meaningless "Twilight"-esque love triangle is thrown in - that naturally goes nowhere and only exists to eat up time.

Ultimately, "Twilight" fans will feel ripped off, this isn't the movie that they were promised.  Horror fans will be pissed that this so-called horror movie is so tame.  And movie fans will be annoyed at a hugely bloated cast filled mostly with characters that have nothing to do, a horrible script, and some of the most over-the-top cheese-eating acting you have ever seen in your entire life.  "Red Riding Hood" perfectly manages to be so mediocre that it offers nothing for anybody, not even people like me who are simply looking for something silly to laugh at.

"Red Riding Hood" opens with a little girl and a little boy hunting a rabbit, then arguing over whether they can actually kill it.  The girl, who is supposed to be Little Red here, holds the knife next to the bunny's throat and... nothing.  We have to fade away because the PG-13 rating means that you can't show the gory scene to come.  In fact, its almost twenty minutes before you learn if she actually killed the rabbit or not, leading to my first chuckles:  "well did she do it or not?"  Next thing you know Little Red has grown up into a full-force hottie in Amanda Seyfried, a girl with such a perfect pair of lips that I wonder how people manage to suppress the urge to kiss her all the time.  I know if I were even in ten feet of Amanda Seyfried I'd pounce myself on those lips without a single care in the world.  She's single-handedly made "Jennifer's Body" a complete joke by being several times more attractive than Megan Fox.  No wonder why there's a werewolf attacking her fantasy European village.

By the way, Amanda Seyfried, will you marry me?

On the subject of marriage, Not-so-Little Red Riding Hood has been betrothed to a blond guy, but she really loves a brown-haired guy.  I refer to them as "blond" and "brown-haired" because neither of these characters have any real dimension beyond existing as love interests and they basically have the same blank personality.  Interestingly, hair gel apparently existed back in the Middle Ages, because both of these guys have gelled their hairs to give a fake kind of "bed head" look.  Actually what happens is that they look like anime characters. Red is immediately in love with the brown-haired guy who I think is supposed to be more dangerous or something, but everybody wants her to marry the blond because he has money.  At no point during the entire movie do you get even the slightest hint that Amanda Seyfried has any interest in blondie, and guess who she choose in the end?  Right, the brown-haired dude.  So immediately the love triangle, and the quarter of the running time it takes up is completely pointless, existing only for "Twilight" impressions.  There isn't even a music video portion until the very last second.

Another interesting bit about the Middle Ages is that everybody on Earth has an American accent, except for Gary Oldman, who is attempting a Russian accent?  No... maybe Italian?  Or is it Scottish?  Who knows?  Gary Oldman plays Father Solomon, a werewolf-hunter with a private army of Africans and random Asian kung-fu master.  Solomon immediately guesses that the werewolf is actually a citizen of the village, but the only question is:  who?  Oldman, apparently walked on the set and saw everybody overacting, and so decided that if "Red Riding Hood" was a competition to see who could be the hammiest, he was in it to win.  Solomon spends the movie screaming and smashing scenery to epic hilarious proportions:  "GOD IS STRONGER!!!"  "Put him in the ELEPHANT!!"  "On the BLOOD MOON, one who is BITTEN is CURSED!!!"  Of course, if you're hoping for a great battle between Oldman and the werewolf, prepare to be disappointed.  He's mostly here to be a secondary villain.

Julie Christie plays Grandma, and despite having starred in "Doctor Zhivago" in 1965, Julie Christie doesn't look half bad.  I consider her relatively youthful face to be one of the great marvels of modern science.  Grandma's main purpose in this movie is to act strange and be a red-herring for the wolf.  At one point I swear to Christ that Grandma was about to make-out with Red.  I blame the lack of an R rating for killing the kink.  Julie Christie comes off as utterly insane in this movie, and is hilarious to watch.

As for the rest of the cast... eh.  Virginia Madsen is here playing Red Riding Hood's mom, but has absolutely nothing to do here and only three lines tops.  Madsen I must say is a dead-ringer for Amanda Seyfried and they really do like mother and daughter, which is a shame since that connection is wasted in this pointless movie.  Bella's Dad is here too just for the "Twilight" props, playing Red's dad.  He's moved the soul-patch he had in "Drive Angry" into a scruffy five o'clock shadow.  Then surprise surprise, Saul Tigh, XO of the Battlestar Galatica shows up a druken villager who wants to kill the wolf.  Sadly Colonel Tigh gets mauled by the werewolf early on, killing my buzz.

The funniest moment of "Twilight"-style moronship comes when Riding Red is at a town dance.  She sees her boyfriend over to the side dancing with the local slut.  So in order to make him jealous, Red dances with the person right next to her, a girl.  These chicks are grinding over each other at one point. I mean, lesbians did exist in the Middle Ages, its a universal part of the human condition, I suppose, but would peasants have any clear idea of what it meant?  Why would this guy get jealous of a girl, when he should have a limited understanding that women even could be sexual together?  Worse, this scene is a giant tease, there is no kissing or anything.  What a waste.  I suppose if you want real lesbian horror, watch "Black Swan" again.

Here, I'll spoil the ending for you:  Bella's Dad is the Wolf - making him the villain twice in less than a week.  He ate Grandma, and wants Little Red to join him in wolfhood.  Little Red refuses, and then her boyfriend kills Bella's Dad.  But he got bitten, so is going to be a werewolf from now on, and Red is going to wait, and blah blah blah I was out the door already before the credits rolled.

What "Red Riding Hood" wanted to be was an interesting fantasy movie using the Little Red Riding Hood fable as a kind of metaphor for coming of age sexuality.  The only problem is that a movie has already done that before:  its called "In the Company of Wolves" and is far scarier.  "In the Company of Wolves" was a heavily psychological and dreamlike movie without any single plotline, but a feeling of overwhelming fear.  That's the kind of movie that will leave you with a strange feeling that the world you knew before watching it has been changed forever.  I highly recommend it.

"Red Riding Hood", however, is just a jumbled mess, half a bad rip-off of a better movie that came out twenty-five years earlier, and half a rip-off of the most hilariously bad film franchise in history.  Its just not good enough, and its just not bad enough. I mean, its not unbelievably terrible, if you need a movie to rent it might be enough, but otherwise, just go see "Battle:  Los Angeles" again.