FrightFest Glasgow review – Red Riding

FrightFest Glasgow review – Red Riding

This goes from council house miserable realism to fairytale gothic when young Redele Riding (Victoria Tait) comes home to find her mother has overdosed and her only option is to go and live with a wealthy grandmother (Lynsey Beauchamp) she’s never met … which means settling into a vast estate in Scotland, with sinister servants (Bill Fellows, Jenny Quinn) and a bearded mad cannibal ‘wolf’ (Ian Whyte) in the surrounding woods.  In addition to grappling with elements of the Red Riding Hood story, Red has to winkle out a complicated generational backstory about her not-exactly-ideal family and the lengths to which they’ve gone to preserve wealth and privilege over the years.  With heritage setting, a captivity and compulsion narrative and the constant threat of devolving into torture porn – whippings are part of Red’s training process and there’s a presumption she’s going to end up tied to a post while part of her anatomy is eaten by the family’s dark secret.  It covers fairly familiar thematic ground – we’ve seen a lot of nasty rich poshos in British horror lately – with some quease-inducing relish.  It’s a little on the slack side, with characters who take an age to tumble to what’s going on and then blunder and bungle their way into fatal danger – and unwilling to take the plunge into full-on hairy monstrousness.  Note that the corrupt policeman (Robert Cavendish) at Grandma’s beck and call is given the character name ‘Sergeant George Dixon’, which is as much of a red flag as ‘Redele Riding’ (he mother was called Scarlett).  Scripted by Peter Stylianou (Bloodhound, Drained), directed by Craig Conway (who’s acted in a lot of films by exec prod Neil Marshall).