'Red Riding Hood' a Twilighted foray into a fairy tale
Famed werewolf hunter Father Solomon (Gary Oldman) summons together the good people of the medieval village of Daggerhorn to give them the bad news:
A werewolf is stalking the village, and because werewolves revert to human form during the day, the beast could be anyone in town!Uh, actually, that's not true.
Because the werewolf has been around #8220;for decades,#8221; that would automatically eliminate as suspects all the younger citizens around the same age as Valerie (Amanda Seyfried), the wearer of the red riding hood in Catherine Hardwicke's revisionist horror fantasy #8220;Red Riding Hood.#8221;
Hardwicke is mostly known for her blistering indie chronicle of girlish adolescence in #8220;Thirteen#8221; and her serviceable but unremarkable indie-produced first #8220;Twilight#8221; installment, a gothic tale of girlish adolescent romance.
In #8220;Red Riding Hood,#8221; Hardwicke attempts to put an adolescent romantic fantasy spin on the old tale of the wolf killing girl with the enticing picnic basket.
But it's a dimwitted mess, a gothic romance so badly bungled that a packed audience at a Tuesday night press screening laughed during scenes intended to be deadly serious.
One involved a terrifying moment when the mysterious werewolf confronts Valerie, but instead of eating her, the wolf starts talking to her.This is, after all, a gothic fantasy, and there's nothing wrong with a killer werewolf stopping the violent slaughter of villagers to chat up a young woman with blonde tresses and iridescent blue eyes.
But Hardwicke fails to set up these jarring developments so they don't ambush viewer expectations and create opportunities for spontaneous nervous titters.
Armed with a real Hollywood budget, Hardwicke boasts meticulously designed medieval sets and costumes. But the computer-created werewolf effects look cheesier than Jacob Black's lupine alter-ego.
As for Valerie, she has a bigger problem than being torn between her childhood love, the poor woodcutter Peter (Shiloh Fernandez), and the rich ironsmith's son, Henry (Max Irons), chosen by her parents (Billy Burke and Virginia Madsen) to be her future husband.
After decades of being satisfied with sacrificial offerings of lambs and goats, the werewolf has killed a young villager: Valerie's older sister. (Apparently, the werewolf didn't eat the victim or even bite her. A simple claw swipe on the chest did the trick.)
The villagers summon Father Solomon to help catch and identify the beast. He's so dedicated that he killed his own wife for being a werewolf.
Solomon doesn't suffer fools lightly. He puts them inside a life-size metal elephant, then slow-roasts the occupants over a fire until he gets the information he seeks.
Julie Christie plays Valerie's grandmother, a shifty lady who seems to know more about what's going on then she lets on.
Lukas Haas plays Father Auguste, a well-meaning simpleton who worships Father Solomon and his brutal campaign to stamp out lycanthropy.
Could either of them be the werewolf?
#8220;Red Riding Hood#8221; shamelessly teases us with overt fake clues to mislead us about who might be the changeling beast.
We can assume that Valerie comes to no fatal harm since she narrates her own story in a superfluous, lazy voice-over designed by screenwriter David Leslie Johnson.
There are a few strange, sexually related developments in #8220;Red Riding Hood#8221; that shouldn't be spoiled in this review. But the romantic view Hardwicke takes of the impossibly cute Valerie and a devilish werewolf hints at a much darker story than this movie allows.
Neil Jordan's 1984 fantasy #8220;The Company of Wolves#8221; offered a smoother treatment of werewolf transformations as sexual metaphors. Joe Dante's 1981 thriller #8220;The Howling#8221; made the same connection with literal bluntness.
In the case of #8220;Red Riding Hood,#8221; the sexual implications of lycanthropy are at best fuzzy in a movie where the characters constantly perform acts that we don't understand and can't quite believe.
“Red Riding Hood”
One and a half stars
<b>Starring:</b> Amanda Seyfried, Billy Burke, Gary Oldman, Lukas Haas, Virginia Madsen, Julie Christie, Max Irons
<b>Directed by</b>: Catherine Hardwicke
<b>Other:</b> A Warner Bros. release. Rated PG-13 for sexual situations, violence. 100 minutes.