Hoodwinked! (2006)

I’ll get to my review in a little bit, but before I do that, I want you to ponder something for me. What defines a cult film? And by that, I mean a movie that has a special place in someone’s heart. Usually only a small group of people, but not necessarily. How can one determine if a movie is going to be liked by a lot of people, or loved by the few? They can’t. It is impossible to determine who is going to like a movie. With one exception (usually one can tell if a movie is going to be terrible), it doesn’t seem possible that George A. Romero knew that the small little indie horror film he was making in 1968 would be watched by a nerdy little teenager over 40 years later (me). That film, Night of the Living Dead, is one of the most popular cult classics in history. And a little lower on the list we find Hoodwinked! A retelling of the Red Riding Hood fairytale, Hoodwinked! is a perfect cult film in its right. Granted, that does mean that it’s not for everybody, but it sure as heck is for me. To sum the film up in a nutshell, try to think an animated Red Riding Hood scientifically fused with Rashomon and also some very funny jokes and a little bit of The Usual Suspects. For those who do not know, Rashomon was a Japanese film from director Akira Kurosawa, who is one of the best directors in history. If you get the chance, please check that and Seven Samurai out. They’re both very good. But Rashomon tells a story from four different perspectives in order to figure out a crime. And that’s basically Hoodwinked! The four here are Red (Anna Hathaway), Granny (Glenn Close), The Wolf (Patrick Warburton), and one that was not in the original story, Kirk the Woodsman (Jim Belushi), who is an actor, who got a call back for a forest-set commercial, which led him to chop down a lot of trees. Red just wants to get out of the forest and see the world, Granny has a dark secret, and, basically, The Wolf is Fletch from the movie of the same name. And these four stories all collect to find the ‘Goody Bandit’, an unknown entity who is stealing all of the recipies for the desserts in the forest, therefore putting them all out of business. I know, it’s kind of ridiculous, but the film does make up for its completely ridiculous plot with some very funny jokes. Just having seen the original Arthur, this movie reminded me of that. I really didn’t laugh out loud during either of those films, but they were both funny and, at times, downright hilarious because they were smart. The jokes in this film are smart and funny. The film is one of the best I have ever seen when it comes to independent animation. And the film shows. The animation in the film is terrible. It is so awful, but it’s okay. The movie is low-budget. And they didn’t want to spend time on animation. They wanted to spend time on funny jokes. They wanted to make a movie that someone would go into expecting mediocrity and then come out a few years later and have that listed as one of their party movies. And accomplish that they did. With the extremely inferior sequel out on DVD, I highly recommend that you pick this up. Trust me, there are much worse movies out there.
8.5/10