What big eyes...
> Red Riding Hood
2 stars (out of 5)
Director: Catherine Hardwicke
Cast: Amanda Seyfried, Gary Oldman, Billy Burke, Shiloh Fernandez, Max Irons, Virginia Madsen, Lukas Haas, Julie Christie
Rating: (M)
Taking an old fairy tale and giving it a modern spin sounds cool.
Adding in Catherine Hardwicke as director looks smart. She did the first Twilight so she knows a thing or two about mixing the supernatural with teenage lust.
Red Riding Hood (Rialto and Hoyts) is set in a fantasy medieval village which is being terrorised by a wolf. Each full moon the villagers leave out livestock and the wolf lets the villagers live until one month a young girl is killed instead.
Valerie (Amanda Seyfried) is grief-stricken, as it is her sister, but she also has more urgent problems with her parents arranging her marriage to hunky blacksmith Henry (Max Irons) when she loves just-as-hunky woodcutter Peter (Shiloh Fernandez). We all should have such problems but Valerie is really bummed by it.
To cheer her up her grandmother (Julie Christie) gives her a red cloak to keep her warm as she wanders around the forest at night. Things heat up when an expert in the supernatural, Father Soloman (Gary Oldman), turns up to rid the village of its curse.
Soloman knows this is no ordinary wolf, but a werewolf who returns to human form as one of the villagers during the day. With suspicion falling on everyone, Valerie has to work out just who she can trust. By the end all I could say was "bite me".
Best thing: This sounds weak but the art direction made this lovely to look at even as the story made no sense.
Worst thing: The ending is seriously weird.
See it with: friends, you will need to have the what was that all about? discussion afterwards.
- Christine Powley
