Back in 2008, Catherine Hardwicke directed Twilight, the first instalment of Stephenie Meyer's no-sex-please-we're-vampires saga.
The film had the biggest opening ever for a female director and went on to take $400 million worldwide. But Hardwicke passed on the sequel.
Red Riding Hood, produced, oddly enough, by Leonardo DiCaprio's company, Appian Way, is what she did next: a tween werewolf whodunnit mash up, aimed straight at Twilight audiences.
It's set in a cod-medieval never-never land, in a thatched village, surrounded by thorny pine forests, covered with artificial snow - and it's only very loosely based on the folk story as collected by Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm. There's a granny (Julie Christie) and a wolf (CGI) and a fine red cape but otherwise everything's changed, to fit the formula of a teenage beauty, Valerie (Amanda Seyfried), trying to choose between two hunky teenage suitors. Choices, choices, girls!
Desperately dashing Peter the woodcutter (Shiloh Fernandez) was Valerie's childhood sweetheart and he's a stunner in black leather, shouldering his axe, but he's got no prospects.
Valerie's mother (Virginia Madsen of Sideways) wants her to marry the scion of the village's richest family, Henry the blacksmith (Max Irons), also a looker and not a bad bloke either. What to do? But there's a complication looming.
The village - Daggerhorn - has long been haunted by a werewolf, although for years it's been content with noshing on sacrificial piglets. Now it has killed again - Valerie's older sister - and moreover it's the time of the "blood moon", when the werewolf's curse can be passed on to its victims. The villagers, after an unsuccessful werewolf hunt of their own, call in renowned pest control expert Father Solomons (Gary Oldman, outrageously strutting his stuff in purple velvet, attended by a blingy posse). He tells them that the wolf is one of them and they had better look out for the tell-tale signs - abnormal behaviour, strange smells ...
But who can it be? Granny? The village idiot? Or someone even closer to home? Whoever it is, the wolf is fixated on Valerie. Could Peter or Henry secretly be a monster? Most men are, after all, as soon as they lose control.
At this point, the movie is structured weirdly like a Hercule Poirot country-house mystery, inviting you to work out who must be the hidden killer by a process of elimination, as the pool of suspects gathers again and again, after each killing, the village church standing in for the library. Sadly, this means there can be no giveaway transformation scenes, the big treat of most werewolf flicks.
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Red Riding Hood is preposterously staged from the beginning, in which as kids Valerie and Peter capture a supposedly wild rabbit, which is white, fat and tame, to the end, when daffs flower improbably. These impoverished, frozen villagers all wear the nattiest raw-silk garments - and their funky dancing, when they mistakenly think they've dispatched wolfie, is a hoot.
The dialogue includes such immortal lines as "if you love her, you'll let her go" and "you have no idea what you're dealing with". When the beast is finally unmasked, it complains: "I have been so disrespected."
Given the obvious symbolism of the story - sexual awakening, family repression, again - Red Riding Hood peculiarly fails to stir. The heart of the teenage girl may well be a dark forest - but never one quite so naff as this.
Red Riding Hood
Cert: 12A
