Abominable Advent Calendar Day 6: Little Red Riding Hood and the Monsters (1962)
Crapsterpiece Category: AnythingSploitation, WTF Were You Thinking?
Heads Up: high potential for viewers’ mental scarring; children and cute fuzzy animals in constant peril
K Gordon Murray’s Little Red Riding Hood and the Monsters, or Caperucita y Pulgarcito y los monstruos, is ostensibly a children’s movie, but it’s really a dark morality tale under a thin veneer of fantasy, musical numbers, and blatant disregard for fire safety. Murray’s gig was to buy Mexican films cheap and re-dub them for American audiences.
The film is a sequel to Caperucita y sus tres amigos (Little Red Riding Hood and Her Three Friends), but you don’t need to witness the original trainwreck to understand the semi that rammed into it. Mr. Ogre and Mr. Wolf are on trial in the castle of the Queen of Badness for having helped Red and Tom Thumb in the previous movie. At the trial, the monster jury sings a chipper little ditty about decapitation and condemns Mr. Wolf and Mr Ogre to death by circular saw. Did I mention this is a children’s film?
The Queen of Badness and her sister turn the local villagers, including Red and Tom’s families, into mice and monkeys, which Red and Tom accept with remarkable aplomb. Red and Tom set off through the scary forest with Stinky the Skunk to get into the castle, get a potion to turn the villagers back, and rescue Wolf and Ogre. As they wander, Red becomes entangled in a human ribcage lying on the ground (as they do in most forests).
Stinky uses his amazing fart power to disable a kidnapper who they find at the mouth of a cave below the castle, and they release a clown car’s worth of children from his sack. They string him up in a tree, hit him like a piñata, and poke at him with lit torches while the dog jumps and barks around them before wandering off, most likely to chew on the discarded ribcage. There are several more monster fights in the papier-maché cave, climaxing in a battle with a dragon with an actual flamethrower in its mouth, which our intrepid heroes and the band of near-feral kids go after with lit torches. Somehow, the entire dragon, cave, and mob of children do not catch fire.
Red, Stinky, the dog, and Tom arrive in the torture chamber just in time to rescue Wolf and Ogre, inexplicably leaving the circular saw running. But the Queen of Badness captures Red. Wolf, Ogre, Tom, the dog, and Stinky manage to steal the potion with the help of the Queen’s sister—who isn’t really bad after all—rescue Red just as she’s about to have her eyes gouged out, and banish the Queen. The villagers are disenchanted, the monsters disappear, the Queen’s sister gets a new pretty dress, the Fairy of Dawn sings a song, and the dog—who, if you haven’t guessed, is the smartest and best character—wanders off.
If the kids in the audience weren’t cowering under their chairs with the stale popcorn and Milk Duds by now, they were probably in shock. That said, if you watch this as an adult and you like “What the hell were you thinking?” movies, it’s hilarious.
