There I was, licking my lips at the possibility that Catherine Hardwicke’s Red Riding Hood was going to be deliriously awful, the kind that sparks internet memes and general merriment whilst intoxicated. You know, like Wicker Man.

But no, Red Riding Hood merely turned out to be moderately awful, the kind that sparks nothing more than a laboured sigh as it earnestly trudges from one soap operatic moment to another. You know, like Twilight.

Speaking of Twilight – which is something I try to avoid doing – Red Riding Hood is the spawn of the same director, Catherine Hardwicke. Wanted for her crimes against humanity, the production story goes that Hardwicke took asylum at a medieval fair and secretly filmed this movie during opening hours, casting many unsuspecting patrons in major roles. To her credit, the film’s female lead bears an uncanny resemblance to Amanda Seyfried (Chloe), although it couldn’t possibly be Seyfried given her listless performance. In any case, she embodies Red Riding Hood, a bug-eyed teenager who lives in a small medieval village called Daggerhorn.

Also residing in this village are two GQ models, Peter (Shiloh Fernandez; Cadillac Records) and Henry (Max Irons; Dorian Grey), both vying for the heart of Miss Hood, or Valerie as she prefers to be known. Valerie is madly in love with bad-boy Peter because he’s all dark and brooding, but her parents have arranged that she marry good-boy Henry, who is both handsome and wealthy, but not nearly as dark and brooding. Both Fernandez and Irons are vacuous screen performers, so if you ask me, she loses either way.

But wait, there’s more! During the full moon, their village is tormented by a ravenous werewolf that, surprise surprise, also wants a piece of Valerie. When the wolf murders Valerie’s younger sister, betraying the town’s long-standing agreement to only eat livestock, the men of the village decided to hunt down the creature, but end up killing a common grey wolf instead. The only one who knows better is famed witch hunter Father Solomon, played by Gary Oldman (The Book of Eli), an expert at slaying werewolves and hamming it up (his performance, not the werewolf). Father Solomon shares the revelation that the werewolf isn’t some beast living in the forest somewhere. No, he or she is a lowly villager who has been living amongst them all along. (Now, if only they had a vacuum cleaner handy to see which one of them would start barking…)

Unlike Twilight, which was written by two women, Stephenie Meyer and Melissa Rosenberg, Red Riding Hood has been penned by one man, David Leslie Johnson. This might explain why the quixotic teen romance is overshadowed by the somewhat engaging whodunit storyline, which will probably disappoint the pre-teens in the audience looking for their next poster boy. Johnson appears to have taken most of his inspiration from 2004’s The Village and 2010’s The Wolfman – not exactly films you want to take inspiration from — than he has the classic Grimm fairy-tale the film is supposedly based upon. With a Big Bad Werewolf on the prowl, Red Riding Hood clearly aims to scare, yet Hardwicke’s direction is about as tense as a broken rubber band, let down by awkward staging and tacky production design. Worse still, the film is almost entirely humourless besides from one instance where “lock him in the elephant!” is yelled by Oldman, the only one willing to embrace the film’s inherent foolishness.

Perhaps the only real surprise is that Red Riding Hood doesn’t set itself up as the beginning of a franchise, ending with few loose ends to explore. That’s great news for everyone but Snoop Dogg, whose planned sequel and directorial debut Lil’ Red Riding in da Hood will just have to wait.

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