My oh my, did I want Red Riding Hood to be awful.

“Awful” can turn a bad movie into a genuinely memorable one (see: Birdemic, The Room, The Happening)—I expected Red Riding Hood to fall in line.  It’s Twilight­-director Catherine Hardwicke’s take on the iconic childhood fairy tale, with a love triangle between Red (called “Valerie” here, and played by Amanda Seyfried) and two hunky gentlemen (Shiloh Fernandez and Max Irons), a werewolf that’s stalking Red’s village and could be (GASP!) anyone in disguise, and a scenery-chewing performance from Gary Oldman as the world’s best werewolf hunter.  Twilight certainly delivered on the gloriously awful front; I had no reason to suspect that Red Riding Hood wouldn’t.

Except it doesn’t.  It doesn’t hard.

Hardwicke talks on the video commentary about wanting a fairy tale atmosphere; maybe that explains why her film is so boring, but even the best fairy tales are loaded with crazy nonsense.

What does Red Riding Hood have?  A mopey love story with no heat.  I have seen Seyfried convincingly act in other films, but as David Denby wrote of the film in The New Yorker (and there’s no way anyone can top it), “Seyfried…walks around with her mouth open, as if she had strayed into the movie from a porn flick,” and it’s true—she brings that same anesthetized and vacant attitude that certain actresses from that particular cinematic persuasion have.  Not that “Red’s Men” offer much help in the chemistry department.  Fernandez is so blandly offensive; you could digitally erase him from the movie and very little would change.  Irons fares better—he has some of the same smoldering intensity as his father, Jeremy Irons—save for the fact that his character is the most underwritten corner of the love triangle.

The werewolf angle has the same plodding appeal as the love story.  Hardwicke and writer David Johnson bungle the potential for a lurid, Ten Little Indians-esque mystery by adhering to the whodunit mechanics of a “Scooby Doo” episode.  Put it this way: ten minutes into the film, I’d figured out the werewolf “Red Herring” character and narrowed down the rest of the suspects to two, and one of them turned out to be the baddie.  Suffice to say, the movie wasn’t as suspenseful as it should have been.

Even the aesthetics don’t work.  Tom Sanders’ production design is inventive and striking, but Hardwicke has no idea how to shoot it for maximum effect, so it just looks like a cheap set.  Furthermore, the physical werewolf design of the movie provides no pleasures because a) Red Riding Hood is PG-13, so no gore is allowed, and b) Rhythm and Hues, the effects house that did such good work on The Wolfman and Solaris, made the beast look like a big dog with fake CG fur.

What does work?  Julie Christie (as Red’s grandma) still looks fantastic at age seventy, and Gary Oldman livens up all his scenes as a crazed werewolf hunter.  His character makes no sense— like Nicolas Cage, Oldman has a tendency to lapse into weird for weird’s sake in projects that are beneath him—but his intensity and bizarre vocal mannerisms are entertaining to watch.

I wish the same could be said for the rest of the film.  I never expected Red Riding Hood to be “good,” but I thought I had a good shot at getting “awful.”  It’s possible I’ve underrated achieving that latter objective since Red Riding Hood fails even with all the proper elements at its disposal.  What a disappointment.

Warner Home Entertainment’s Red Riding Hood Blu-ray looks fantastic, despite my distaste for the actual movie; the 2.39:1 frame gets a luscious 1080p video transfer and an appropriately aggressive DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track.  Given the middling performance of the film at the US box office (roughly $38 million earned against a $42 million budget), I’m surprised that Warner did such a thorough job with the A/V work—it’s proof-positive of their appreciation for Blu-ray and for film in general.

They’ve also given Red Riding Hood a fair amount of special features, though you’d be hard-pressed to find much substantive content here.  To wit:

• Alternate Cut:  This Blu-ray exclusive alternate cut runs thirty-four seconds longer than the theatrical release.  The only change comes in the last five minutes, and it’s a horrible addendum that makes explicit what was only implied in the theatrical cut.
• Secrets Behind the Red Hood:  This picture-in-picture commentary intersperses BTS footage from the set with a sit-down conversation between Hardwicke and actors Amanda Seyfried, Shiloh Fernandez, and Max Irons as they watch the film.  The BTS stuff is unspectacularly produced but decently informative, while the bits with Hardwicke, Seyfried, Fernandez, and Irons are dreadful.  Fernandez drops banal observations, Seyfried looks uncomfortable, and Hardwicke, though an enthusiastic and friendly speaker, is unfocused and repeats much of what she said in the BTS portion of the commentary.
• Behind the Story:  Whenever these seven featurettes stray towards fluffier topics—such as the “Red’s Men” and “Casting Tapes” ones engineered to show out Irons and Fernandez—they suffer, but the more technically-oriented BTS segments—like “Before the Fur” and “Making of the Score”—are quite good.
• Additional scenes: Cut for a reason.  Move along.
• Gag reel: Eh, if you’re a fan of watching Seyfried and Co. blow their lines and giggle, then this is for you.
• 2 music videos: Fever Ray’s “The Wolf” and Anthony Gonzalez’s “Just a Fragment of You.”

The Blu-ray has a lot of material, but most of it isn’t terribly informative.  Still, fans of Red Riding Hood should be satisfied with the quantity of material.

Not that I’d imagine there are many fans out there.  This reimagining of the classic fable fails as both an absorbing fairy tale and as a potential camp classic; it’s too bland and boring to satisfy.  This is a good Blu-ray of a bad movie.  Pity it’s not bad enough.

Red Riding Hood streets on June 14^th.  Click HERE to view Amazon’s pre-order listing.

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Red Riding Hood Alternate Cut on Blu-ray Combo pack and For Download 6/14