Girl in da hood

I can’t say why exactly, but about 10 minutes into Red Riding Hood, Catherine Hardwicke’s Twilight-heavy reimagining of the old fairy tale, I started thinking of Jaws. Maybe it was the isolated and frightened village, desperate to rid their midst of a large wolf that preys on the occasional villager; maybe it was the scene where the angry mob beheads a wolf and parades the trophy around on a stick in the village square like the shark hunters in Amityville. Or maybe it was the arrival of Gary Oldman, playing a dastardly werewolf hunter named Father Solomon, that put me in mind of Old Quint, the Robert Shaw character in Jaws who scoffs at the town’s claims that it killed the Great White. “I’ll find yer werewolf for five thousand,” I imagined Father Solomon chuckling, “but I’ll kill ‘im for ten.” Exit Solomon, humming Farewell and Adieu, Ye Fair Spanish Ladies...

But then I woke up and realized I was watching a film much inferior to Stephen Spielberg’s scary 1975 classic. Still, it does have Gary Oldman, turning in the second best animal performance of the film.

Red Riding Hood concerns Valerie (Amanda Seyfried, the young lass in Mamma Mia!) who grows into young adult lasshood in a wooded village where her childhood boy pal Peter (Shiloh Fernandez) is now a woodcutter, her father is a lush and her mother has promised her hand to a wealthy but snobbish blacksmith’s son. There’s a kooky old grandmother (Julie Christie) who keeps making with the weird eyes and the scary donning of wolf skins. After Valerie’s sister is killed by a large animal, the town tracks down and kills a wolf in a cave, but Father Solomon arrives to piss all over their victory party, noting that a real werewolf turns back into human form when killed; this one didn’t.

The villagers don’t care; they hold a celebration that pretty much begs for a bunch of them to get eaten, getting jiggy before a huge bonfire with provocative, shoulder-shrugging moves that are, literally, wolf bait. Soon after, many of them get eaten.

After this, Solomon and his posse pretty much take over the village through fear and intimidation, getting everyone to doubt their neighbors and question the identity of the real wolf (when, really, all the villagers needed do was conduct a head count when the wolf last attacked; whoever was missing and not dead was obviously the werewolf).

Wolfish: Gary Oldman (as Father Solomon) chews some scenery.

Oldman’s character is kind of like a fairy tale Dick Cheney, sowing the seeds of fear for his own personal benefit, and he eventually gets his comeuppance. But not before turning in an eye-rolling display of overacting and an accent that sounds like it’s wrapped in thick barbed wire (Hardwicke, director of Twilight, must have instructed Oldman: “Give me that voice you did in Coppola’s Dracula, but back it up to about a ‘6.’”). Oldman is fun to watch, though his animal performance is given a fair run for its money by Christie’s seasoned scene chewing.

In a playful but half-assed twist, it’s implied that Grandma might actually be the werewolf herself, not just a wolf in Grandma’s clothing. Meanwhile, Valerie is given a red hoodie by her mom (it was meant to be her wedding gown), a garment whose rich color suggests blood, menstruation, violence, as well as protection, seduction and a red warning signal all at the same time. Alas, all other attempts to mine interesting new depths from the “Little Red Riding Hood” fairy tale stop at surface level, perhaps due to fears that a deeper exploration of Freudian or sexual themes would endanger or confuse the prospective, ill-read teen audience.

It’s a pity, because all kinds of fertile material — about sexual initiation, incest, blood memory, the color red — could have been tackled in Red Riding Hood and made this more than just a campy bit of piffle (not unlike Kim Kardashian’s Red Riding Hood ensemble last Halloween).

The source of the story is Charles Perrault’s version of the old fairy tale, but also a short story version by Angela Carter called “The Company of Wolves,” which Neil Jordan filmed in 1984. Jordan — not a man to shy away from weird Freudian exploration — created a dreamy, bloody, gothic tale, one that perhaps runneth over with sexual imagery. Hardwicke, for all her hormone-fueled teen demographic, tones down much of the sexuality, the lust, the violence, and the deep, dark fantasies lying beneath this tale. It’s a “Just Say No” version of “Little Red Riding Hood.”

Fast food: The CGI werewolf pounces in Red Riding Hood

On the plus side, Amanda Seyfried has very big eyes indeed, and some screen presence. But she’s not given much character to explore, other than widening her eyes even wider at every wolfy development. In true Twilight fashion, she must choose between two available but broody guys, one of whom might be a lycanthropian killer. She has a typically adolescent stormy relationship with her mom and pop and is unhappily accused of being a witch in a turn straight out of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. No matter: she keeps having dreams that she will end up wandering the snowy hills with the wolf boy of her dreams, so you’re pretty much sure where that relationship is headed.

Also unintentionally hilarious are the revelations that come pouring out in the last 15 minutes of Red Riding Hood. Perhaps realizing there were too many plot points to wrap up in this would-be “whodunit,” Hardwicke has Valerie’s father spill out all the secrets in one go, just like a creaky old episode of Murder She Wrote. (In fact, Angela Lansbury did star in both that old TV mystery show and Jordan’s The Company of Wolves… Hmm…)

Red Riding Hood is a trifle, something you’ll forget as quickly as you would polish off a basket of goodies at Grandma’s house, but it’s sort of fun as a harmless time filler. Though we never really get an answer to the key question that still haunts me: Why is it called a “riding hood” when the little girl never rides anything?