Holy fucking shit.

Sometimes there are movies so bad that it is honestly hard to know what exactly to write about. Things are so terrible that you don’t know where to start and the poor quality or abject lack of any quality at all can make it difficult to even describe. Red Riding Hood is one such movie but given that I sat through this awful piece of crap I feel like I should at least try. But if you are looking for a quick opinion to weigh against some misguided desire to see this then I will save you the extra content by saying that if you have anything else to do, and this includes root canal work, shit shoveling, explosive diarrhea while in midtown traffic, walking in on your wife of 5 years in bed with your dad, walking in on your wife of 5 years in bed with your mom, being water boarded for treason, and having your appendix removed through your urethra then you should avoid this movie. If you don’t have anything better to do you should still avoid it because it is that bad.

A more modern take on the Little Red Riding Hood story done through a very stylized fairy tale lens with a healthy dose of Twilight juice injected into it, Red Riding Hood casts Amanda Seyfried as Valerie, a blond hottie who, rather than doing what she was suppose to as a little girl, made friends with a scruffy kid with whom  she hunted and killed rabbits and who eventually grew up to be the object of her affection Peter (Shiloh Fernandez). Peter is a woodcutter who works with Valerie’s dad Cesaire  (Billy Burke) who is kind of a drunk. I can imagine why given that he is married to Suzette (Virginia Madsen) who seems to think she is in a tele-novella  at best and bad community theater at worst. Peter and Valerie’s love is stymied by Henry (Max Irons) who Valerie has been arranged to be married to and looks pretty much just like Peter if Peter had brown hair and less crazy eyebrows. Henry is an apprentice blacksmith and as such is more suitable to marry than a lowly woodcutter apparently. Oh, there is also a werewolf terrorizing the village and has done for as long as anyone can remember. So that sucks. Eventually a batshit crazy priest Father Solomon (Gary Oldman) shows up and who’s job is apparently to strike the set once the movie is over by chewing as much scenery as he can fit into his mouth. The werewolf could be anyone and Valerie finds she can hear the werewolf in her mind and saw that his eyes were brown. So everyone in town with brown eyes is a suspect, Read: Everyone who isn’t Valerie.

So listen there are cool things that could be done with a more serious Little Red Riding Hood story. You could go into the sexual innuendo that is laced through the original fairy tale and move past goofy high school romance if you wanted. Kind of like In the Company of Wolves did. You could do a modern retelling like Freeway (although hopefully suck less). You could really do pretty much anything else with the story than what they did here. The romance is massively cliched and obvious with all the passion of a wet dishrag. I will hand it to them that the sexuality that they did inject here popped a lot more than anything the Twilight series has to offer but that isn’t saying very much at all.

This is also the most bloodless werewolf movie in history. I think Teen Wolf had more gore in it than this did. Early on a villager is taken by the wolf and the camera sweeps in dramatically to show the body lying there in a moment that was clearly meant to be shocking but it looks like the victim cut herself shaving rather than having been the victim of a werewolf attack. Pretty much every death in the movie was this milquetoast and only one injury went the extra mile with some blood. That it was goofy and made no sense is beside the point.

The sets look like something that a local high school with a shoestring budget might have thatched together with paper machete and balsa wood and colored by crayons. Renaissance Festival sets  look more period and convincing than the sets of this movie. Watching it is a lot like watching an elementary school play where you are waiting for the moment that one of the kids is going to get his blocking wrong and knock a tree over or take out a load bearing member in the main house set. You could maybe blame this on stylistic choices made to keep the fairy tale feel but I don’t buy it. Style is not an excuse for shoddy production values.

The acting is likewise often stagebound. Virginia Madsen in particular seems to think she is doing community theater and may have actually been reading her lines off of a piece of notebook paper that the director was holding at the edge of the stage. I am pretty sure I have seen her perform well in the past but here she is awful. Julie Christie’s turn as Grandma is equally melodramatic and feels like the big acting necessary for the stage but this might have to do with the movie trying its best to make her a werewolf suspect.

The principles are generally alright. Amanda Seyfried acquits herself well enough here but there is only so far that the material can take her. Shiloh Fernandez and Max Irons pull off being pretty pouty man types pretty well and I can’t really fault them for how they look. I will say that it scares me if this is the future of leading men but whatever. Billy Burke turns in yet another good job in a bad movie but this time the look on his face suggests that he hasn’t changed expression since he read the script. I hope whatever debt he is paying off doing this kind of work is finished soon. Again, Oldman chews scenery like there is some cure in there for whatever disease he has that makes him take this sort of role.

Director Cathrine Hardwicke had a real chance to redeem herself from the stink of the first Twilight movie but instead decides to do pretty much the same thing. She employs a lot of sweeping crane shots and aerial tracking shots to glide over the mountains and through the woods in very dramatic fashion. This would have been more effective if the same six shots weren’t repeated anytime they needed to make a scene transition less clunky and awkward. She can’t film action any better this time around either and deals with interesting things off camera while showing the audience boring shit they couldn’t care less about. I will say that her dynamic camera moves were the most interesting thing going on in the film and the overall look is kind of pretty but neither of these things do anything to improve the final product.

Conclusion [3.0 out of 10]

This movie is a complete travesty in every conceivable way and should be avoided at all cost unless you get together with your friends while drunk to mock the holy living shit out of it. I was pulling for this movie as I would love to see the story done well in an adult way but this film does not do it. It is teen girl fluff that I am sure will find an audience with that set but nowhere else.