2011's Red Riding Hood is a Forgettable Twilight Knockoff Distinguished by Memorable Turns from Mank Stars Amanda Seyfried and Gary Oldman

Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.

The makers of the 2011 stinker Red Riding Hood had a very stupid, very lucrative idea. They asked why the classic tale of a brave little who tangles with a wolf while attempting to visit her grandmother couldn’t also be the movie and book series Twilight.

Despite being famously terrible, Stephanie Meyer’s brainchild have made a LOT of people a LOT of money. It consequently stands to reason that if Red Riding Hood were to look and feel a LOT like Twilight then it too could make a fuck ton of money.

To make things even more blatant, the geniuses behind this sub-par motion picture went so far as to hire the actual director of the first Twilight movie, Catherine Hardwicke to direct.

After making her name as a production designer for films like Three Kings and I’m Gonna Git You Sucka, Hardwicke made her directorial debut with 2003’s Thirteen, a hysterical youth gone wild melodrama that was treated at the time by many critics as a wake up call to the world to stop ignoring the problems of over-sexualized white American teenagers.

Then came Lords of Dogtown and The Nativity Story and finally the zeitgeist-capturing Twilight, which was as successful and terrible on-screen as it was as a series of uniquely god-awful fantasy novels.

Hardwicke’s vision for Red Riding Hood was, unsurprisingly, a gritty fairy tale version of Twilight but she had other ideas as well. She set out to make a movie that was as dark visually as it is thematically.

We’re talking Barry Lyndon levels of darkness. Hardwicke set out to make a movie that looks like an old painting. Unfortunately she made a movie that’s every bit as kinetic as an old painting as well.

Oh, and she also makes the old time village where everything takes place look exactly like the wintry Northwest of Twilight.

Red Riding Hood is a sexy, sexy, or rather “sexy” love triangle in which one corner could very well be a lycanthrope. Throughout the film, there is much conjecture as to who is, and who is not a werewolf, and I think I speak for the sum of humanity when I say that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to be less invested in that particular subject.

Mank’s Amanda Seyfried is her usual gutsy, magnetic self as the heroine, a strong-willed young woman who lives in a village plagued by a werewolf problem.

Sacrifices seem to keep the beast at bay but eventually it develops a taste for the sweet, sweet meat of human beings in the form of our heroine’s sister. In desperation Preacher Father Auguste (Lukas Haas) recruits the services of Father Solomon (Gary Oldman) to kill the beast.

Oldman used to reign as one of cinema’s true chameleons, having inhabited an astonishing variety of iconic roles as dissimilar as Winston Churchill, Sid Vicious, Joe Orton, Dracula, Lee Harvey Oswald, Mason Verger, Sirus Black and Commissioner Gordon.

Then came Mank and everything changed. Now I can’t look at Oldman and see anybody but Mank. When I watch Dracula I think “why is legendary Hollywood wit Herman “Mank” Mankiewicz trying to drink Winona Ryder’s blood?” When I watch Hannibal I wonder what on earth has gotten into Mank and why he’s trying to eat poor Ray Liotta’s brain.

THAT’s how powerful the role of Mank is. He is literally our greatest icon and hero. He was VERY clever.

MANK!

Mank on a horse!

Of course seeing Oldman here made me think about my man Mank. But it also illustrates just what makes Oldman such an enjoyable ham. Red Riding Hood is cold and dreary and dramatically as well as visually inert but then Oldman swaggers in as a werewolf-hunting man of God whose unique conception of Christianity involves money, power, sex and killing shape-shifting monsters for fun and profit.

He’s given the James Brown entrance. He’s a rock star and clear-cut horrible human being/possible/probable werewolf. It’s a movie star turn that gives the film a much needed influx of flash, personality and excitement.

Red Riding Hood has two big assets in the stars of the beloved, Academy-Award nominated motion picture Mank. Seyfried’s nuanced, committed turn as a spirited young beauty navigating her way through a world of monsters real and metaphorical deserves a much better, less insultingly derivative vehicle. And Oldman does what he’s paid handsomely to do: single-handedly elevate the proceedings with lusty scenery-chewing.

Hardwicke’s underwhelming snoozer is equally unsatisfying as a sexed-up soap opera about the horny machinations of a beautiful young woman and two smoldering, emo-looking hunks and as a dark fantasy about a village at the mercy of a secret killer.

I’m watching this eminently skippable wannabe because Seyfried’s mother is played by Virginia Madsen, whose complete filmography I am covering for this column. So I’m skipping ahead twenty years in the timeline, from 1991’s Becoming Colette to 2011’s Red Riding Hood.

Madsen looks wonderful. She made the transition from playing ravashing beauties and femme fatales to moms gracefully and is ideally cast as Seyfried’s mom and Julie Christie’s daughter. There’s a tremendous physical resemblance but also a similarly feisty spirit.

Yes, Julie Christie plays grandmother and the movie toys with the notion that maybe granny IS the werewolf. Wouldn’t that be gritty? And intense? How about in your face? A twist like that would really drive home that this is not your mommy’s Red Riding Hood but rather a radical new version for a generation that lives on the edge and thinks nothing of slamming some Red Bull and then smoking a marijuana cigarette but also, confusingly, can’t handle anything beyond a PG-13.

Red Riding Hood is PG-13, which ensures that it will be a sexy romance that’s not too sexy as well as a scary horror movie that’s never particularly scary or even terribly atmospheric.

I thoroughly did not enjoy this hackneyed take on an oft-told tale. Thankfully that leaves nowhere to go but up when it comes to my deep immersion in the gothic wonders of the spooky season.

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