Red Riding Hood

I let my friends talk me into seeing this film with them because I think Amanda Seyfried is adorable and I had high hopes that this supposedly adult re-imagining of a children's folk tale would be entertaining in the same aspect of Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow...how disappointed I was.

The acting was so corny and so ridiculous although I can't help but feel that it's not entirely the fault of the actors, but the director. The dialogue was so incredibly cheesy that at several points throughout the movie, groans were heard throughout the audience. Visually, the film is beautiful but the plot is choppy, the romance scenes are cringe worthy, everything about this film was just painful. Shiloh whatever his name is has a constant sneer/smirk on his face that makes his character so annoying. And the other love interest was just plain dull. Seyfried is a perfect Red Riding Hood but she brings nothing to the film other than her constantly doe eyed, surprised expression.

Do not waste your money on this crap.

Just returned from a nearly sold out theater and I must say the film was somewhere between decent and good!

I've read quite a few reviews here and was truly surprised about the supremely negative feedback. "The Grimm brothers would roll in their graves," someone wrote. My response to that is: "Really, would they now?" I believe a bit of research on the subject would do some quite a bit of good. The brothers Grimm -which weren't the original story tellers of 'Rotkaeppchen' as they called it- told folktales, not fairy tales…they were the very first tabloid writers and although their stories all had a grain of truth at the very core, the brothers wrote them to feed into peoples believes, superstitions and prejudice in central Europe in the 1800…their tales were often capricious and usually cruel, showing very little moral. It took generations of translations and retelling to soften the originals enough to be considered bedtime stories because the originals would have provoked nightmares in grown man at their time. Does anyone know what the significance is of the name Peter and why he wears black throughout the entire film?? I'd love to read your ideas about that. The film is a nice translation…yet another one. And by far closer based on the Grimm brothers vision than the stories we all were told as kids. I did see a bit of parallel to Twilight but only because both, this film and all the Twilight movies were filmed in Vancouver and surely used the same scenery. The Storyline is based on the folktale and (in my opinion) it has been done rather well.

You'd be hard pressed to find a better example of a film ruined by trying to be too many things to too many people than Red Riding Hood, which opens Friday and, by all rights, should close Saturday.

The most obvious audience Hood hopes to attract is fans of the Twilight film series, snagging the director of the first film, Catherine Hardwicke, and refashioning the Little Red Riding Hood folk tale into, in a remarkably halfhearted way, a love triangle between three extraordinarily uninteresting characters. (If all three had been eaten by the wolf in the first act, we might have been onto something.)

What's weird about Hood, which inexplicably counts Leonardo DiCaprio as one of its producers (stick to swimming in icy water, Leo), is that this romantic angle is not its main thrust. It doesn't have a main thrust.

In fact, for a supposedly sexier take on a classic folk tale, it's in desperate need of thrust in general.

It flits around the idea of being a more adult folk tale but never commits. It throws in a bit of (pretty bad) CGI werewolf attack action from time to time, but it's nowhere near violent or bloody enough (it's PG-13) to interest action or horror fans. It has moments of campy fun, specifically every second Gary Oldman appears as a sinister Cardinal Richelieu-type character, but other scenes are played ridiculously straight.

Perhaps the film's biggest mistake — and that's saying something — is structuring itself like a Scream film. The Big Bad Wolf is indeed a werewolf, and our sweet little Red (named Valerie, played by Amanda Seyfried) has to figure out which of her fellow villagers turns into a beast when the moon is full. Is it her forbidden love, the dull as dishwater Peter (Shiloh Fernandez), who presumably equates to the hunter of the folk tale? Or is it the man she's been arranged to marry, the somehow even duller Henry (Max Irons)? Or is it one the other remarkably dull villagers? And given how dull Valerie is, who the hell really cares?

On looks alone, Seyfried perhaps is perfectly cast as Red, considering Christina Ricci might be a bit too old for the role. Seyfried's pristine, alabaster skin and enormous eyes give Red just the right look, but every time she opens her mouth you're begging for that werewolf to put her out of our misery.

To be fair, no actor could be expected to excel given the cheesy dialogue and Hardwicke's uninspired direction; solid veterans such as Virginia Madsen, Julie Christie and Lukas Haas struggle to make an impression, with Christie holding up the best. As Red's father, Billy Burke seems more zoned out than James Franco at the Oscars, suggesting he's only here for one more Twilight connection.

Only Oldman acquits himself well, simply because he treats the film as the campfest it should have been from the opening credits. He's acting in an entirely different movie, a Sam Raimi romp like Army of Darkness or Drag Me to Hell, and Red Riding Hood briefly becomes almost fun during Oldman's most animated scenes.

The film doesn't even look that great in a technical sense: The exteriors look fake, all clearly shot on soundstages, and not fake in an intentional "this is a dreamy heightened reality, because this is a folk tale" way. They look fake in a "we really suck at our jobs" way.

Red Riding Hood is pretending to be a darker, more adult take on the folk tale, but it's hardly the first: Neil Jordan mined the territory in 1984 with the R-rated The Company of Wolves, focusing more on sexual metaphors and heavy werewolf action. It wasn't great, but at least it knew what it wanted to be. Red Riding Hood tries to be a little bit of everything, but ultimately it succeeds only in being a tedious mess.

This certainly isn't the best werewolf movie you're ever going to come across (not by a longshot) but I thought it was better than you'd imagine from some of the responses the movie is getting. It's very loosely based on the old folktale of Little Red Riding Hood (which, by the way, goes back far into European history long before the now famous version by the Brothers Grimm; the first print edition of the tale dating to the late 17th century) and it also has one scene (really just one line) that for some reason chooses to pay homage to the story of The Three Little Pigs ("I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll blow your house down" cries out one young man as others fall down around him.) Although you can't avoid those connections (and are probably intended to make the connection) it's probably best that you try not to, and watch the story in its own right.

It's the story of a small village that has arranged a truce of sorts with a local werewolf. Every full moon, they put out livestock for the beast to devour and in return the beast leaves the people alone. For some reason, though, the beast breaks the pact and people begin to die. The mystery revolves around the identity of the werewolf, once a werewolf-hunting priest (Gary Oldman) shows up in town and warns the people that the werewolf is one of them. The question becomes "who is it?" and the mystery is pretty decent. There are any number of reasons to suspect any number of people of being the beast, and the ultimate revelation of the werewolf's identity surprised me a bit - it was not my first choice.

I thought director Catherine Hardwicke made pretty good use of the setting of a small, isolated town deep in the mountains, and Amanda Seyfried was excellent in the role of Valerie (the Red Riding Hood character.) The movie also provides a pretty good depiction of paranoia and the ultimate consequences that paranoia can have, even (and perhaps especially) on people who know each other as well as the residents of this town obviously did.

This isn't really (in my opinion at least) a horror movie. It's more of a mystery, and as a mystery I thought it worked pretty well. I certainly think it deserves to be rated more highly than it is. (7/10)

I have never written a review before, nor have cared enough to look and read through reviews in the first place. However, I do have something to say about this movie, and the reviewers who think their opinions are worth listening to.

In my case, I go in to watch movies on non-biased terms. Meaning, I do not go in with any pretenses or theories jaded by others speculation. I go in to watch what the movie is offering, and interpret it in to my own fashion, seeing as every one will have their own opinions. So, I did the exact same prep with this film. I bought my ticket, sat in my seat, didn't think twice about what I was about to see, and just watched.

I loved Red Riding Hood. I thought it was beautiful, it was subtle and sexy- especially with the knock out soundtrack- and, most importantly, I went on a journey with the film. It kept me hooked, and although there were a few silly moments or corny lines, I still found myself lost in the mystery and the unknowing of the film. All movies will have their faults, or what I like to call, inflections. One, for me, was wanting to see a more developed character of Valerie and her family. I would have enjoyed seeing a relationship between her and her sister before Lucie was killed and where to story we saw began, as I would have understood her pain on the same level. As well, I would have liked to have seem more about her Grandmother and the way she lived at the same age as Valerie growing up with the Wolf and its legend. To me, that would have made the film a whole and the storyline would have become more dynamic. But, seeing as they wanted to have this film out in theatres and not as a mini series, I think what they put in the film fit wonderfully with the time gap of the audience's attention.

Now, it is one thing to review a movie on it's pros and cons and to point out where the plot failed or the story line succeeded. However, it is another thing to write a review comparing it to a movie with the same director and showing the apparent similarities. Yes, I am talking about all you reviewers who only had one thing to say: Twilight. I have seen Twilight, I have painfully endured Twilight, and I dismissed Twilight. Twilight has a flawed script and storyline, and I personally believe the only good Twilight was the first Twilight, as Catherine was able to draw the attention away from the story line with the visuals, the camera angles, etc. To try and accuse Red Riding Hood of being a "Twilight clone" is absurd. If you were to compare anything to Twilight, I'm sure you would find some similarities. It's what makes movies Movies. All movies follow the same structure. There will always be conflict, there will always be a climax, and there will always be a resolution. If you know Red Riding Hood, the actual story, not the censored picture book you were read as a child, then you would know that the censored version is a simple, straight forward idea. The Brothers Grimm tale is however, what you SHOULD be comparing this film to. And, I believe the director, the camera crew, the actors, etc all played in to this old, twisted fairy tale we all think we know and did a very good job of it.

All in all, Red Riding Hood did what it was supposed to. Entertain, and keep you on the edge of your seat. It's beautiful, it is gracious and it is well adapted.

Now, go and read the Brothers Grimm tale!