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Imagine Hansel and Gretel but with the gingerbread swapped for bacon and the witch for a tap-dancing cartoon jellyfish
Yes, Red Riding Hood features a girl in a cape, a doomed granny and a huge, chatty wolf. But there the similarities between the classic bedtime frightener and Catherine Hardwicke's revamp end. Imagine Hansel and Gretel but with the gingerbread swapped for bacon and the witch for a tap-dancing cartoon jellyfish and you'll have some idea of the liberties Hardwicke and co have taken to help make this film as closely as possible resemble her previous one: Twilight.
Our heroine, Valerie (Amanda Seyfried) is, like Kristen Stewart in the vampire saga, faced with that problem familiar to all average teenage girls: how to choose between two hunks, both smitten with her.
There's childhood sweetheart Peter (Shiloh Fernandez, reportedly Hardwicke's first choice for the Robert Pattinson role in Twilight), a smoothie woodchopper with whom Valerie once skinned a bunny – an important plot point, it turns out.
But her mum (Virginia Madsen, in Dolly Parton wig and lashings of olde worlde mascara) has promised her to cute, rich blacksmith Henry, played by Max Irons, often seen doing fetching welding. Nightmare!
But just when you thought things couldn't get any worse for Valerie, her sister is killed by the wolf that sometimes visits round full moon. Local vicar Lukas Haas summons professional pest controller/priest Gary Oldman, who arrives in full-length maroon velveteen with blingy crucifix accessories, armoured bodyguards and pimped-up cart in tow. Oh, and a 20ft iron elephant (how they lugged that over the snowy mountains is left unexplained).
Oldman tells the villagers the bad news: the wolf is actually a werewolf, and might be a close relative. What are the signs? "Interest in the dark arts. Abnormal behaviour. Isolation. Strange smells."
So the rest of the film plays out as half murder mystery, in which we must sift through the red herrings in search of the person who smells most fishy, and half teatime soap, in which Valerie's keenness to have more than a chaste roll in the hay with Peter (something that does actually happen) is curbed by her fear that he may not be all he seems.
Neither strand grips, nor is either really silly enough for this to pass as a full-blown guilty pleasure.
Julie Christie has some fun as Granny, and there's something comforting about the kind of medieval-ish vision in which men are men, waving tankards and getting stabbed, and women are women, sitting in mud huts sobbing and knitting. But the projection of a modern teen aesthetic on to a fairytale template feels awkward at best – in particular the festival scene that melds sexy hip-hop style dancing with vaguely pagan handclaps.
Ultimately, though, it's the seriousness with which Hardwicke treats the tale that proves its undoing.
When your po-faced voiceover tells us that "few knew the name" of the village, "but many had heard of the terrible things that happened there", it's unwise to reveal immediately afterwards that it is actually called Daggerhorn.
