Red Riding Hood

ALERT VIEWER Horror-fantasy. Directed by Catherine Hardwicke. Starring Amanda Seyfried and Shiloh Fernandez. (PG-13. 109 minutes. At Bay Area theaters.)

For a movie about a bloodthirsty werewolf slashing up a tiny medieval village, "Red Riding Hood" sure is pretty.

First on the list of pretty things is the heroine, a gal named Valerie (Amanda Seyfried) in a flowing red cape. Next is Peter (Shiloh Fernandez), the woodcutter she adores, who curls his lip into the prettiest of sneers. Also pretty is Henry (Max Irons), the tousled smith who loves her unrequitedly. Her mother (Virginia Madsen) is pretty. Her grandmother is pretty; she's Julie Christie, so she doesn't have much choice. Even her father (Billy Burke) is pretty, at least when he isn't drunk on mead.

The mountains are pretty. The whorls of fake snow are pretty. The dappled storybook ambience and musky scent of adolescent horniness are pretty, especially when Peter and Valerie snog by firelight on the soft hay in the granary.

The only thing that isn't pretty is the wolf, a mangy black thing with yellow eyes and a weird ability to mind-speak with Little Red. No one calls her that, but that's who she is - the titular lass who skips through the forest to Grandma's house in her hand-crafted hooded outerwear, meeting the wolf en route.

Catherine Hardwicke's prettified movie is a strange adaptation because it supplants the woodsy horror of the original fairy tale with two new elements: a romantic triangle and a witch hunt. Its best moments occur after Gary Oldman shows up as a werewolf hunter in a purple velvet cassock, bringing a welcome jolt of hammy intensity to an otherwise humdrum mystery about who the wolf really is.

Hardwicke started out as a tough-talking chronicler of girls ("Thirteen"), but she's been softening the focus for a few years now; her last effort was "Twilight," another pretty teen triangle with fangs. She and "Orphan" screenwriter David Johnson are clearly aiming to de-victimize their heroine, but they've gutted all the terror from the story. If the Big Bad Wolf isn't central to the plot, what's it doing there? Ultimately, "Red Riding Hood" is just another movie about a girl pining for a boy, defined by a boy, held back by a boy. And that's not pretty.

-- Advisory: Violence and creature terror, and some sensuality.