"Never stray from the path, never eat a windfall apple, and never trust a man whose eyebrows meet in the middle," warns Granny (Angela Lansbury) to Sarah Patterson's pre-pubescent Little Red Riding Hood, but how can she stick to any advice when her budding sexuality smells like honey to the Big Bad Wolves skulking around the woods? Updating the classic fable as Grimm-meets-Freud mood piece, Neil Jordan zooms in on the adult links between sexuality and dread usually submerged in children's fairy tales, and some of the imagery seems to predate Tim Burton's. Actually, the original setting is a Thatcherian modern household, where the young heroine, fresh from an introduction to the mysteries of menstruation, "kills" her older sister while in turbulent slumber (the first of the film's many dreams). Only then can she venture into the dark forest and listen to her Granny's ominous yarns of lupine predators sullying female purity -- Stephen Rea tears out his face upon finding his estranged bride with a new brood; an unbilled Terence Stamp Rolls Royces in for a Mephistophelian cameo; and a roomful of peruked fops morphs into a pack of wolves, courtesy of a shunned sorceress. Though there is no shortage of lycanthropic animatronics, the movie is closer to Suspiria's overripe artifice and fantasy-of-the-subconscious than to the wise-guy genre-bending of The Howling or An American Werewolf in London. Maybe setting the stage for future explorations of the liquidity of desire of Mona Lisa and The Crying Game (to say nothing of the dark reverie format of In Dreams), Jordan complicates screenwriter Angela Carter's more straight feministic reading with a characteristic feel for grisly sexuality -- when the girl's dreams fuse into reality, the relief of release is inseparable from the horror. With David Warner, Tusse Silberg, and Kathryn Pogson.
--- Fernando F. Croce
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