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Valerie (Amanda Seyfried) is almost torn between two lovers in the gothic fantasy “Red Riding Hood.” |
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 “for decades,” 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 “Red Riding Hood.”
Hardwicke is mostly known for her blistering indie chronicle of girlish adolescence in “Thirteen” and her serviceable but unremarkable indie-produced first “Twilight” installment, a gothic tale of girlish adolescent romance.
In “Red Riding Hood,” 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. (Read more…)