Disney would rather you forgot all about it, but there was a time roughly a decade or so ago when every major Hollywood studio got in on the revisionist fairytale act, which gifted us such forgettable titles as Snow White and the Huntsman, Mirror Mirror, Immortals, Jack the Giant Slayer, and Red Riding Hood – perhaps the worst offender of them all.
Directed by Twilight‘s Catherine Hardwicke and produced by Leonardo goddamned DiCaprio of all people, the absolutely awful hybrid of fantasy, romance, and horror was left out in the freezing wastes of critical scorn to die by way of an embarrassing 10 percent Rotten Tomatoes score.
Even the target audience weren’t exactly thrilled, and it’s incredible how a filmmaker with previous in the genre can take a classic fable, before casting the likes of Amanda Seyfried, Virginia Madsen, Julie Christie, and Gary Oldman in something that turned out to be so egregiously awful. There’s a reason why the Mouse House cornered this particular market, and spending 100 minutes with Red Riding Hood spells out the reasons pretty clearly.
And yet, the promise of blood on the snow coupled with longing glances between attractive stars has done enough to convince the Netflix masses that the end product may not be as bad as its reputation would suggest. Spoiler alert; it is. Per FlixPatrol, though, Red Riding Hood has scampered onto the platform’s most-watched list, with the panned tale of monsters and unrequited feelings hitting the spot for a number of subscribers that’s so worrying it borders on the alarming.
