Red Riding Hood (2011)
Directed by Catherine Hardwicke
Valerie is in love with a brooding outsider, Peter, but her parents have arranged for her to marry another man. Unwilling to lose each other, Valerie and Peter plan to run away together when Valerie's older sister is killed by a werewolf that prowls the dark forest surrounding their village. Panic grips the town as Valerie discovers that she has a unique connection to the beast--one that inexorably draws them together, making her both suspect ... and bait.
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30 films that influenced Red Riding Hood
What critics say influenced Red Riding Hood
If she had been smart enough and sly enough she could have created an adult fairy tale along the lines of Neil Jordan's "The Company of Wolves."
(For the quintessential film treatment of the story, see Neil Jordan’s 1984 film The Company of Wolves, which is based on the short story by Angela Carter.)
Seyfried and Fernandez enjoy a few stolen kisses and a chaste roll in the hay, but the film never tries to plumb its source's psychosexual depths in the manner of, say, Angela Carter's "The Company of Wolves" (filmed by Neil Jordan in 1984).
The second horror movie inspired by the Little Red Riding Hood tale (the first was 1984's "The Company of Wolves," directed by Neil Jordan), the new movie takes place in a deliberately artificial, almost Rankin/Bass-looking medieval village called Daggerhorn -- a doubly phallocentric name that ought to sound a warning to any young maiden.
The film you’re looking for is probably 1984’s certifiably crazy “The Company of Wolves,’’ with its Freudian psychology, icky transformation scenes, and Angela Lansbury as a malevolent granny warning Little Red to “never trust a man whose eyebrows meet in the middle.’’
Like many a classic fairytale, the Red Riding Hood story has been much revised and revisited over the years, perhaps most notably by the late British author Angela Carter, whose 1979 short story collection The Bloody Chamber (the basis for Neil Jordan’s 1984 The Company of Wolves) offered three distinctive variations, including one in which little Red cuddled up with the Big Bad Wolf himself—and in Granny’s bed no less!
A sister to the heroines of "Thirteen" and other Hardwicke films, Valerie -- her name likely borrowed from the magical 1970 Czech horor-fantasy, "Valerie and Her Week of Wonders" -- is threatened not just by wolves of varying degrees of hairiness but by a heritage of abuse and dysfunction that, as manifested in the real world, is no fairy tale.
("The way you walked was thorny," indeed -- to quote Maria Ouspenskaya in 1941's "The Wolf Man.")
Reimagining a legend already subject to innumerable changes over the centuries, the script by David Leslie Johnson ("Orphan") superficially recalls Tim Burton's "Sleepy Hollow" in the way it spins a classic tale into a convoluted whodunit cloaked in small-town superstition and religious paranoia, though "Red Riding Hood" lacks the earlier film's visual mastery and rich sense of time and place.
Sure, the slayer is menacing and uses harsh interrogation tactics, but what “Red Riding Hood” needs is Johnny Depp’s Ichabod Crane character from “Sleepy Hollow.”
By taking the children’s story audiences know and fleshing out the details, there’s an almost Tim Burton directorial feel of theatrical atmosphere similar to Sleepy Hollow.
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Even the big bad wolf's a massive disappointment: misshapen and moth-eaten, a far cry from the godlike beasts in 1981's " Wolfen ."
Virginia Madsen was amazing in Electric Dreams, Sideways and Candyman.
Like a vintage Hollywood silent (or Guy Maddin's 1992 cult gem, Careful), events transpire within tight parameters - the village square, the mead hall, a verdant thicket in the woods.
Indeed, from the beginning of the colour-drenched prologue, it's clear the film owes more to cinematic fever-dreams like Ridley Scott's Legend and Walter Murch's Return To Oz than the not-so-magical realism of 21st century fantasy like the Harry Potter franchise.
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Clearly modelling itself on the melodrama of Twilight, this modern take on a classic tale ends up an unintriguing dud.
Still, the material with the monster isn't the worst thing offered up by this "re-telling" of the popular children's story - that label belongs to the dreaded love triangle, which is so badly scribbled that it could have been lifted directly from the series in which director Catherine Hardwick recently toiled: Twilight .
"Red Riding Hood" suggests what it might look like if the kids from "Twilight" got dressed up and went to the Renaissance Faire.
You probably already have some preconceived notions about Red Riding Hood thanks to the fact that its a angsty, tween film directed by the same woman who directed the original Twilight movie.
The movie was directed by Catherine Hardwicke , who made the first "Twilight" film.
Has she moved on from the “ Twilight ” saga?
Indeed, from the beginning of the colour-drenched prologue, it's clear the film owes more to cinematic fever-dreams like Ridley Scott's Legend and Walter Murch's Return To Oz than the not-so-magical realism of 21st century fantasy like the Harry Potter franchise.