By Mark HadleyTuesday 29 Mar 2011MoviesReading Time: 2 minutes
Red Riding Hood
Rating: MA 15+
Distributor: Roadshow
Release Date: March 24
I liked the idea of this film from the outset: what was the real story behind one of the best known children’s stories? Sadly Red Riding Hood has switched a solid piece of grandmotherly advice for a far less believable 21st century lesson.
Red Riding Hood is supposed to be a re-think of the classic German folk-tale by Catherine Hardwicke, who also directed Twilight. Amanda Seyfried plays Valerie, a golden-haired teenage girl who lives in a village in the middle of forbidding mountains. The town lives under the threat of a werewolf known to haunt the nearby forests. For some unknown reason the werewolf decides to break a generations-old truce and kill Valerie’s sister. The village priest sends for help and it arrives in the form of Father Solomon, a mean-spirited clergyman played by Gary Oldman. The less-than-good father reveals that the werewolf is actually someone living in the village right about the time it becomes clear that the beast has taken a particular interest in our golden haired heroine.
Red Riding Hood is a mixture of The Brothers Grimm and The Crucible, with hints of The Village thrown in. Unfortunately there’s a nasty taste of Twilight that spoils the taste. I’m a bit of a fan of the shape-changer films; I think vampires and werewolves are something like the cowboys of the present generation. They are often presented as dangerous heroes that exist on the edge of our world with a hard-earned wisdom of drawn from the darker side of life. Unfortunately Hardwicke has turned this time-tested morality tale into a fight between two pretty-boys over an airhead in a village that resembles Orange County more than it does Transylvania.
There are more than a few predictable Christian stereotypes to watch out for. Red Riding Hood boasts not one but two priests. The first of whom is a spineless, ineffectual wimp who no-one takes seriously; the second is a nasty piece of work who tortures the innocent and terrifies everyone else. Neither have anything helpful to say to this world. And where the original Red Riding Hood warned children that evil will often attempt to pass itself off as something good, this film seems to tell teenagers that being ‘cursed by God’ is not a problem so long as your motives are right. Still, the audience I sat with spent so much time laughing at this tale of terror, I’m encouraged to think they’ll chuckle at that conclusion at well.