Little Dead Rotting Hood (2016) and Other Adaptations of Little Red Riding Hood

Most people know the story of Little Red Riding Hood.  It has been passed down through generations.  There is a little girl who wears a red hood.  She has to get to her grandmother’s house on the other side of the woods and decides to take a shortcut through the trees to get there.  Along the way, she encounters a wolf.  When she gets to her grandmother’s house, the wolf has taken the place of the grandmother.  What big ears you have.  The better to hear you with.  All of that fun stuff.  Then, depending on whether it’s the Grimm version or a sanitized, grandma and the girl are either eaten or trapped, and it’s up to a woodsman or hunter to save them.

With the story being such a popular one, it is only natural that it has been adapted to film on many occasions.  Different filmmakers have taken their own stab at the tale and it has managed to go in many different directions.  Freeway was a modernized adaptation.  2011’s Red Riding Hood was a Twilight-esque adaptation that came out during the glory days of that franchise.  Hoodwinked! turned the story into a crime mystery.  This week’s movie was the Asylum version of the folk tale, titled Little Dead Rotting Hood.

I have seen numerous iterations of Little Red Riding Hood, including the four that I have already mentioned.  In this post, I will compare those four versions of the story, as well as two others named Rotkappchen: The Blood of Red Riding Hood and 2003’s Red Riding Hood.  Each movie did their own thing with the story and they all stand as individuals amongst the vast sea of Little Red Riding Hood movies.  They are as original as movies can be with established stories.  Much like Shakespeare’s works, this story has become an inevitable addition to the new releases each year.  There will always be something new that uses the story as a basis.  The first movie I discuss will be the newest one that I am covering.

Little Dead Rotting Hood

Produced by The Asylum, this movie came out at the beginning of 2016.  Much like anything from The Asylum, it took a story that everyone knows and completely changed things while having references to the familiar aspects.  The story is the same in only the bare blueprint.  There’s a woman in a red hood.  There’s a big bad wolf.  They battle each other.  That’s about the only real similarity between the classic tale and this movie.

In the small town of Stillwater, there were wolf attacks.  The wolves weren’t the usual red wolves that were sometimes in the area.  They were grey wolves that weren’t supposed to be anywhere around there.  The wolves were ripping out people’s throats for… I don’t know why.  Sheriff Adam (Eric Balfour) and Deputy Henry (Patrick Muldoon), for some reason going by their first names, went on a hunt to get rid of the wolves.  When the wolves attacked the hunting party, a girl in a red hood started hacking and slashing at the wolves.  Things only got crazier from there.

The story was modernized, as the setting was a present day small town.  But the thing that The Asylum did to make it their own was give it an action horror twist.  Of course, their usual sexy women and bad effects were there too.  It wouldn’t be an Asylum movie without that stuff.  They allowed their telling of the story to stand out amongst a pack of other movies using the same source.  Is it the best telling of the story?  Not necessarily.  It does manage to be semi-unique though, which is a good thing.

Hoodwinked!

The second movie that will be covered is a 2005 animated retelling of Little Red Riding Hood.  This iteration of the classic folk tale turned it into a mystery about the events surrounding the wolf being in the bed.  As the detectives questioned each of the people at the scene of the event (Red, Grannie, Wolf, and Woodsman), the audience was told the story of Little Red Riding Hood.  It was an interesting interpretation of the story that hadn’t been done before.

What helped to make the movie stand was the inspiration that it got from Roshomon.  There were four points-of-view for the same event, with each one adding to the story.  It began with Red telling the basic Little Red Riding Hood tale.  The Wolf revealed something new, adding new material to the story and taking it in a different direction.  The same was done with both Woodsman and Grannie.  Only Red’s story was the source material and the movie brought its own originality through the other characters.

A couple notes should be made about Hoodwinked!  It was an independently funded movie, and that shows through the animation.  It can sometimes be difficult to watch.  The other note is that there is a sequel to Hoodwinked! which has almost nothing to do with the Little Red Riding Hood story, outside of sharing the characters.  If you want to see a retelling of the original tale, only the first movie will provide that.

Rotkappchen: The Blood of Red Riding Hood

If you ever thought to yourself that Little Red Riding Hood was a good story, but it needed sex to liven things up, this movie is for you.  Rotkappchen: The Blood of Red Riding Hood was practically an adult version of the story.  It involved a 17 year-old girl named Rose who travelled to America to live with her grandmother.  She ended up being tormented at school and was caught up in a love triangle where a guy and girl were both in love with her.  Oh, and there were murders.

Obviously, what made this stand out was the sex scenes and nudity. Two sex scenes and various other pieces of nudity were sprinkled throughout the movie, turning a children’s story into something that children wouldn’t be allowed to experience.  It was an interesting way to change up the story and try something different.  The problem was that any momentum was brought to a halt whenever there was a sexy scene.

One other interesting creative choice was the use of black and white.  The only other colour that appeared on a regular basis was red.  The contrast of the red within the black and white cinematography highlighted how integral that colour was to the story.  Rose was Little Red Riding Hood.  She loved anything red.  Her love transcended the black and white limitations of the world.  Blood was also able to show through the colourless movie, accentuating the violent acts.  This stylistic choice was something the movie did well.

Red Riding Hood (2011)

Fresh off of the first Twilight movie, Catherine Hardwicke moved onto another movie involving supernatural creatures.  The thing is, she brought the romantic story to the Little Red Riding Hood tale when she made her new project.  Instead of being torn between her love for a vampire and a werewolf, Red Riding Hood (played by Amanda Seyfried) was torn between her love for a woodcutter and everyone wanting her to instead be with a blacksmith.  Cullen to cutter, Black to blacksmith.  There were werewolf attacks too.

The clear inspiration for Red Riding Hood was the Twilight series.  The success of those movies was something that studios wanted to capitalize on and this was one of the copies.  It was meant to tap into that teenage romance that teen girls were paying big money for.  It was the alternative to the continued young adult adaptations.  Instead of coming directly from a young adult novel, it was a movie trying to fit a different kind of story into that model.  For the most part, it succeeded.  It just failed in being anything memorable or entertaining.

Red Riding Hood (2003)

For some reason, filmmakers like to drop the Little off of Little Red Riding Hood.  Maybe they’re thinking like Sean Parker in The Social Network.  The title might seem cleaner without the first word.  The 2011 reimagining of the story dropped that word, as did this 2003 telling of the story.

Red Riding Hood was not good.  There were moments where the music drowned out what the characters were saying.  It is difficult to invest in what is being said when you can’t hear the words.  That can be partly attributed to the acting.  If a better performance were directed, the character’s word could cut through the music and hit the audience in a meaningful way.  It would have strengthened the movie.

There was one thing that made Red Riding Hood stand out.  Red Riding Hood was the bad guy.  The girl that we were following sided with the wolf and helped keep her grandmother hostage.  This change is possibly the largest change of any movie that will be discussed.  The main character wasn’t an innocent girl stuck in a bad situation.  She was a terrible person who was causing trouble.  It made the story darker and brought a new perspective.

Freeway

Most of the movies that were chosen for this post stayed close to the source in one specific way.  Each movie featured a wolf or a werewolf.  They kept that element intact when changing other aspects.  With Freeway, any sort of anthropomorphic animal element was removed.  The big bad wolf was a man named Bob Wolverton.  It was the biggest change in the wolf character.

Freeway wasn’t entirely a remake of the classic tale.  Much like Hoodwinked!, it used the tale as a basis for some scenes, but did its own thing with the characters.  Most of the movie revolved around Wolverton trying to murder the main character and successfully denying the attempt to the police.  The original story came through in the climactic moments as the grandmother scene played out.  Wolverton’s actions were the same as the wolf’s.  It was a modern thriller that utilized a classic story to portray its action.

The setting in Freeway was 1990s Los Angeles.  The main character was a juvenile delinquent.  Her family was involved in prostitution and other crimes.  This was not the wholesome tale (with violence) that you were used to.  Little Red Riding Hood was no longer an innocent girl trying to get to her grandmother’s house.  She was a troubled young criminal trying to survive on the streets.  She came upon a bad man and her life got even worse.

There are more movies based upon Little Red Riding Hood.  These are the six that I remembered watching when thinking about the adaptations.  They were six different versions told in their own way.  No two movies felt the same or told the same exact story.  That is how adaptations should be done.  There is originality found in the way a story is told, not necessarily in the story itself.  The people behind these movies knew that and put their own stamp on an established tale.

Little Red Riding Hood has been around for generations.  It is a story older than any living person.  It has gone through many iterations as people have told it in different ways.  Stories like this stand the test of time.  People like them.  People find them interesting.  People want to make the stories their own.  Little Red Riding Hood is a story that people like to tell.  Sometimes their version is good and sometimes it is bad, but they are always interesting if they’re finding a new way to tell the story.

Here are some notes for those of you wanting them:

• One actor from Little Dead Rotting Hood was in another Sunday “Bad” Movie.  Patrick Muldoon was in Blackwoods.
• The Asylum made a werewolf movie long before Little Dead Rotting Hood.  It was called The Beast of Bray Road.
• The Asylum has also covered another fairy tale in Grimm’s Snow White.
• Have you seen Little Dead Rotting Hood?  Have you seen any other Little Red Riding Hood adaptations?  What other stories get repeatedly adapted into new, interesting versions?  You can discuss any of this stuff in the comments.
• Suggestions are something I’m always looking for with the Sunday “Bad” Movies.  If you have any, you can let me know in the comments or on my Twitter page.
• I have a snapchat account that I use to share clips of bad movies that I watch.  If you want to see the clips, you can find me with the username jurassicgriffin.
• Next week’s movie is going to be something called I Bought a Vampire Motorcycle.  I chose it based on the title, and I assume that it describes what the movie is about.  I don’t know anything more about it.  It should be fun to watch though.  With a name like that, how couldn’t it be?  See you next week when I write about that one.