Here now, we finally see what The Twilight Saga: New Moon might have looked like had Catherine Hardwicke stayed on to direct -- and the result isn't any better than what was delivered sans-Hardwicke. Every fiber of the filmmaker's latest, Red Riding Hood, is adorned with the leaden, artificial sheen that was characteristic of her work on the original Twilight -- semi-sleek filmmaking that flirts with a dangerous edge, yet clings desperately to soap opera-level storytelling with a visual strategy to match. If ever an aesthetic could be described as "drama queen," it would be Hardwicke's. The camera swirls over gorgeous forested vistas, pretty people brood heavily on a hyper-lit soundstage wearing bold colors and distressed expressions, and the camera shifts in all manner of exaggerated angles. Meanwhile, the soundtrack pounds a discordant pastiche of booming sounds into our brains, like a Baz Luhrmann wannabe without the ebullient joy.

If you thought Twilight was a gloomy slog, you ain't seen nothin' yet. Red Riding Hood, at the risk of sounding oxymoronic, is a menacing bore -- its heavily-staged monotony bears down on the audience, threatening to put us all to sleep at any moment. Then a horribly animated CG wolf jumps out and growls into the camera, and we wake up to laugh at how completely ridiculous it all is.

The film is a gothic re-imagining of the classic folk tale, and if you are wondering how such a short and simple story could be stretched to fill a feature length running time, I'll tell you: it isn't. The story is not extended, but rather replaced with a completely invented medieval horror framework that not only overwhelms the basic tenets of the source material, but renders said material all but irrelevant. Red Riding Hood is not so much a creative extension of a legend, but a modern emo-thriller that usurps a legend's title and then ignores the legend itself.

Amanda Seyfried headlines the film as the titular heroine, though in this version she is given a name, Valerie, which feels wrong in a way that illustrates the oddness of the entire film: everything that is mythical and suggestive from the original story is saddled with earthbound attributes that kill any and all sense of wonder or intrigue. Valerie lives on an elaborately art directed movie set intended to represent the Middle Ages, where her town is plagued by a werewolf -- that's right, not simply a wolf, but a werewolf. The true identity of this cursed individual who transforms into a ravenous creature becomes the central focus of the film, which swiftly devolves into what feels like a crime procedural by way of the Brothers Grimm (but not in a good way).

Gary Oldman turns up to not merely chew, but absolutely gobble the scenery as if his paycheck depended on it, as Father Solomon, a "werewolf hunter" who shouts every word he speaks. A typical dialogue sample: "A man bitten...is a man CURSED!" Because since it is a werewolf, a bite will obviously turn the victim into a wolf. But during the three-day period of the Blood Moon, when the wolf prowls at night, the townspeople can hunt the creature, and Valerie becomes the subject of suspicion because she can communicate with the wolf, who speaks in a gruff Southern drawl...are you as confused as I am?

What purpose is there to adding endless expository material to a simple story? Absolutely none, other than indulging the filmmakers' preoccupation with nauseating melodrama and attempting to lure the Twi-hard crowd. There is more subtextual curiosity to some of the original iterations of the Red Riding Hood story than even come close to being probed in this film, where the iconography of a red cape and a salivating wolf are plunked into a Burton-Luhrmann mash-up that is neither meaningful nor entertaining.