Theatrical Review: RED RIDING HOOD

Being that I’m a week late with this RED RIDING HOOD review (my sister Michelle gave birth to a beautiful baby boy last Thursday) and that the review was already late to begin with (HOOD opened in February and is pretty much gone from theaters at this point), I’m not going to take up too much of your time with this. Long story short: RED RIDING HOOD is nowhere near as bad as you’ve heard and fans of old-school Hammer flicks or Harlequin romances (helps to love both) should love this. TWILIGHT fans, on the hand, will probably hate this.

Why? Because despite word to the contrary, this isn’t flick isn’t some TWILIGHT clone. Oh sure, there’s a love triangle between three impossibly good-looking leads and it does dip into the realm of the supernatural (this is a movie about werewolves, after all). And yes, Catherine Hardwicke, the gal who helmed the first TWILIGHT flick, was brought in to direct HOOD. But that’s where the similarities end. The love triangle in HOOD actually works and you can easily see why Valerie (Amanda Seyfried, very good here) would be torn between a true love (Shiloh Fernandez, a little too pretty for medieval times) that doom her to a life of poverty and an arranged marriage (Max Irons) that would that would allow her to never have to want for anything in her life except for…you guessed it…true love. Call me a sucker, but I dig movies that can actually tell a love story and make the audience believe it. Most flicks seem content to just shove attractive actors together and pray that magic happens. Not here, the chemistry is real, the actors are attractive and the whole thing works in a really sweaty/dirty Harlequin kinda way. Kudos to Hardwicke for actually learning a thing or two since her disastrous dance with TWILIGHT (say what you will about that series, but I think we can all agree that Hardwicke‘s direction of the first flick was awful).

Click on the pic to read my full review….