Little Red Riding Hood & The Monsters

Little Red Riding Hood & The Monsters (Caperucita y Pulgarcito contra los monstruos) (1962)

Runtime: 82 minutes

Directed by: Roberto Rodriguez (presumably not related to Robert)

“Starring”: Maria Garcia, Cesareo Quezadas, Ofelia Guilmain, Jose Elias Moreno

From: Peliculas Rodriguez

Here’s the movie I promised I would review earlier in the month. This makes the Mexican Santa Claus movie look almost normal in comparison. It’s also from K. Gordon Murray, who found the movie in Mexico, quickly and cheaply dubbed it, and presented it as matinees across the country, where he’d literally carry the movie in a suitcase.

What best describes it is a 5 minute clip done by the Slate website where a narrator dude describes the psychedelic mindf*** of a film for you. But, to sum it up myself, there’s an evil Queen who is jealous of Little Red Riding Hood, so she wants various monsters to go and kill her. LRRH gets help from Tom Thumb (who randomly can turn into normal size) and a giant skunk named Stinky (?!), along with her dog, to help out two “nice” monsters who are on trial and get tortured… that combo allows for LRRH to defeat the Queen and rule the day.. and that sort of thing.

The aforementioned clip describes things pretty well, and you get a nice synopsis of how strange it is. I mean, it’s a musical, for starters. The lady who does LRRH’s singing voice sounds like a middle-aged woman. Then there’s the freaky scenes that probably would give a huge scare to young children, involving fire and of course those creepy (to me, but in a bad way) monsters. What a bizarre film that could have only been made back in the carefree days of yore. I am glad that I was able to track it down-nevermind how I did so-as in full, it’s a total acid trip oddity that thankfully made its way to tape so that it can be preserved… lest people think that this was made up.

So, that’s it for 2010. Tuesday night I’ll post a short thing where I’ll mention the movies I saw that were released in 2010 that I actually liked (there aren’t that many!) and then Friday the 7th I will post my first review of 2011. What it will be, I don’t know, but it will be less strange than the last few movies I’ve talked about… not that that is saying much.