Red Riding Hood is Catherine Hardwicke's vision of the traditional fairytale. She retains all of the elements you'd expect but makes our heroine, Valerie (Amanda Seyfried), a teenager who is in love with a humble woodcutter but whose parents wish her to marry the son of a local well-to-do family. At the same time as Valerie is struggling to choose between the two, her sister is killed by a werewolf who is known to prowl the woods surrounding the village. When the wolf kills again a famous priest turns up who is known to slay werewolves and he casts doubt amongst the villagers by claiming it must be one of them. As the ring of suspicion tightens around Valerie she escapes the village to visit her grandmother who lives out in the woods, and realises exactly who the wolf is.
As a fan of Twilight and also a bit of a sucker for retellings of fairytales I was very excited to see this film and was pleased to find that Hardwicke has done a pretty solid job. I have my niggles - the style is very cliched 'Hollywood medieval'. Everyone looks like they have a hot shower in their cottage, the architecture is 1970s Disney, and the local graveyard has a serious dry-ice problem. However, once you get past that it's pleasing to see that Hardwicke has retained the more brutal elements of the original fairytale (stomach sewn up with stones, anyone?) and added some more of her own (the priest, played by Gary Oldman, has a torture device for getting the truth out of the frightened villagers) as well as sexing up the story a little to make it more suitable for an adult audience (who the original fairy tales were intended for of course). I also really liked Amanda Seyfried as Valerie, she may have a touch of the Disneys herself but she's undeniably sweet and a brave and independent heroine.
The tone of the movie is a little uneven, with the saccharine stylings contrasted by elements of horror and touches of gore, but I was ok with that. I'm not a big fan of horror generally so I prefer it diluted by the fairytale elements. It's no coincidence that my favourite horror is The Village, which this has a slight overlap with, although nowhere near as dark. I thought that Catherine Hardwicke's adaptation had a very Angela Carter-esque feel (feminist retellings of traditional fairytales - check her out if you haven't already), especially the excellent ending and the ambiguous character of Grandmother (played by Julie Christie), both of which I enjoyed very much. Perfect fare for the Bank Holiday weekend. I'm now looking forward to the next of the current crop of fairytale movies - Beastly.
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