Little Erin Merryweather

I’m not sure that I really get the point of this movie. It seems to fail on every single criteria it sets out to, and yet I have seen so many critical blurbs praising it that I’m half convinced that it’s actually just me, and not that the film itself is just lame. However, I am arrogant enough to instinctively assume that is not the case, and so we shall be plowing on with our unflattering review as per usual.

The film centers around a small university somewhere in New England, where a serial killer appears to have set up shop. All the victims are male students at the college, and so a trio of friends decides that they have figure out who the killer is, since the local police officer is pretty much a clown in a cop’s uniform, and try to enlist the aid of their abnormal psych professor, who helpfully doubles as a former criminal profiler. There’s a few problems with this scenario, and each problem makes the film pretty much unworkable from any point of view. The first is that the murder scenes are largely obscured from view, in the possible thought that the filmmakers were making serious art here, rather than a low-budget horror flick (this despite it having a fairly unwarranted R rating – seriously, this is PG-13 at most). That would leave us with little to go on but the detective work, which the film does spend the bulk of its time on, as the various characters try to piece together who could be the killer, and how do they tie into the story of Little Red Riding Hood. That’s all well and good, except the film lets the audience know who the killer is less than half an hour into the movie (Christ, the movie’s even named after her), so we’re pretty much left watching roughly an hour of the characters trying to catch up to where we already are. It’s an exercise in tedium in any movie where we get that (and be honest, you’ve already thought of at least two other movies you’ve seen where that happens, and you hated it in both of them too), and it’s just made worse here by how very much of the movie is spent focusing on figuring out who she is, even though she pretty openly acts crazy in front of several people.

It’s a shame, because this film does have the exterior trappings of a decent movie. The music is rather pleasant, and the camerawork, if not spectacular, is certainly passable. It’s just that the story itself is fairly worthless, and the various actors, most of which look like they had just stepped off the set of 90210, are pretty uniformly poor. I will single out Frank Havey, who plays the over-the-top blundering police detective, as being the high point of the film, as he manages to take the stereotypical idiotic cop common to these films and go so far with it that he almost becomes brilliant. Outside of that one highlight though, there’s little reason to see this.

Rating: *