Movie Review: Red Riding Hood (2011)

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I approached this film with mixed feelings. The director, Catherine Hardwicke, directed a movie I enjoyed very much (The Nativity Story) and also a movie that I could only watch with an accompanying RiffTrax Commentary (Twilight [1]). In fact, it has a lot in common with the Twilight series besides the director: there is a mythological creature (with a penchant for eating humans) that plays a key role in the ploy, there is a love triangle, and it all takes place in a heavily-forested location.

My verdict: If you can overlook the Twilight-derived elements, it wasn't half bad. They do a fairly decent job of keeping you guessing who the werewolf is (though after it's revealed I felt like I should've known that some of them couldn't be the werewolf). While most of the characters lack depth (just like in Twilight) [2], at least none of them are over the top weird. The filmmakers also do a good job of incorporating the elements of the original fairy tale into the film (except for the "Grandmother, what big eyes you have" scene, which was rather hokey). There is some great cinematography, though a lot of it seems to be computer generated, and several of the sets were well done.

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Notes:

[1] Rifftrax is the successor to Mystery Science Theater 3000 (to read some of my MST3K reviews, see here and here). Rather than record their commentary over the movie (which requires them to purchase distribution rights), now they just record their audio commentary and you play it while watching the movie. See my review of the RiffTrax for Twilight here.

[2]
Leann and I noted that Gary Oldman also appears in another werewolf movie (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban), Michael Hogan also appears in a show where you don't know who is secretly one of the bad guys (Battlestar Galactica), and Billy Burke also appears in a show where you don't find out at first that he's a killer (24).

Image attributions:

Dark Forest is by Jim Barton, available at http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dark forest with a few gleams of sunlight - geograph.org.uk - 1519715.jpg.