This Little Red is not for the kiddies

The tale of Little Red Riding Hood - wandering in the forest, communing with a wolf, having her grandmother chomped to bits and hopping into bed with a lech in a woman's nightgown - it's scary stuff.

But although Catherine Hardwicke's trippy tweenage bodice ripper borrows much from the venerable fable, Red Riding Hood is hardly scary. Funny? Yes. Sexy? For a minute or two (it's rated PG-13 for chomping gore, and for a few lusty throwdowns in the hay). Ridiculous? Most definitely.

With the quavery, saucer-eyed Amanda Seyfried in the title role, Red Riding Hood is set in quaintest Daggerhorn, an alpine burg where the wooden houses stand on stilts and the people stand in medieval hippie couture. Like a vintage Hollywood silent (or Guy Maddin's 1992 cult gem, Careful), events transpire within tight parameters - the village square, the mead hall, a verdant thicket in the woods. There are a few expansive shots of clouds undulating over a sunken valley ringed by mountains, but mostly this is a bunch of actors running to and fro on a dressed-up soundstage. Realism is not high on Hardwicke's list.

What is high on the director's list is riffing on her own megahit, the first Twilight. (Hardwicke had begged off the follow-up, Twilight: New Moon, because the studio wanted it delivered post-haste.) To that end, she has cast Billy Burke, Bella Swan's dad in Twilight, as the father of Seyfried's Valerie, the scarlet-caped heroine. And Hardwicke and her screenwriter have turned the menacing wolf into a werewolf - the creature goes a-stalking when the moon is full - and imbued it, with, well, vampirish characteristics. The beast cannot tolerate daylight, nor holy places, nor silver.

Like Twilight, too, Red Riding Hood offers a love triangle. There is Peter (Shiloh Fernandez), a woodcutter's son who has been in love with Valerie (and vice versa) since childhood. And there is Henry (Max Irons), the blacksmith's son, promised to Valerie in an arranged marriage. "I feel like I've been sold," Valerie bristles, adding a dollop of feminist rage to this frothy brew.