Little Red Riding Hood and the Monsters Movie Poster

Scratch any fairytale, and beneath the surface lurks a horror story. Monsters, murder, and mayhem abound in them. In the case of Little Red Riding Hood, you don’t even need to scratch; the horror is front and center. Red Riding Hood’s granny is eaten by a wolf, who then dresses like granny in order to catch and eat Red.

There are several film versions of Little Red Riding Hood, from the haunting (The Company of Wolves, 1984) to the horrible (Red Riding Hood, 2011), to the hilarious: a little-known K. Gordon Murray “gem” called Little Red Riding Hood and the Monsters (1962). In the tradition of most fairy stories, this is a dark morality tale under a thin veneer of fantasy and musical numbers. The film’s reviewers on IMDB spend more pixels on how it scarred their tender childhood psyches than on the quality of the film itself. But for those fans of so-bad-it’s-good (or at least so-bad-it’s-fun) cinema, it’s a delightful hour and a half of WTF.

K. Gordon Murray’s gig was to buy Mexican films cheap and re-dub them for American audiences in the ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s, It’s him we have to thank for The Robot vs. the Aztec Mummy, Savages from Hell, Shanty Tramp, Santa Claus (the one with the Devil and Pitch that was famously skewered on the original Mystery Science Theater 3000), Santo vs. the Vampire Women (another MST3K standard), and my personal favorite, The Brainiac, about a monster that looks kind of like Count Von Count from Sesame Street sucking people’s brains out through the backs of their skulls. Suffice it to say, Murray has many cinematic crimes to answer for, not the least of which is that his dubbing was often bad enough that major plot points were lost or obscured.

(By the way, before we go on, here be spoilers.)

Little Red Riding Hood and the Monsters, or Caperucita y Pulgarcito y los monstruos, is actually a sequel to Caperucita y sus tres amigos (Little Red Riding Hood and Her Three Friends). The titular three friends are Tom Thumb (Pulgarcito), Mr. Ogre, and Mr. Wolf, and Little Red Riding Hood and the Monsters opens in the castle of the Queen of Badness, where Mr. Ogre and Mr. Wolf are on trial in front of all of the other monsters for having helped Red and Tom Thumb in the previous movie.

The Queen of Badness is a direct ripoff of the evil queen from Disney’s Snow White, so it’s fortunate for Murray that this movie slipped under the radar. Mr. Ogre is pretty much what you’d expect, but Mr. Wolf is the stuff of nightmares. His face is squashed and fur matted like a teddy bear that’s been stuffed in the bottom of a box in a wet basement and chewed on by an extended family of rats, and the costume hangs off him like he’s wearing someone else’s skin.

Wolf and Ogre

The other monsters are a ragtag bunch, too. There’s a Frankenstein’s monster and a vampire; Mr. Carrot Head; a “Father of Hurricanes;” Mr. Two-in-One, a set of conjoined twins, one a caveman and one with at least rudimentary verbal skills; and a kidnapper, as if the wolf wasn’t horrifying enough for children. At the trial, the monsters sing a lovely little song about decapitation and condemn our heroes to death by circular saw by the next full moon, when the owl has hooted three times. Fairytales are serious stuff, kids.

Meanwhile Red, Tom, Red’s dog, and Stinky the Skunk—who sounds like an Ewok, especially when he sings—go to find the Fairy of Dawn for help. Since they’re apparently in no hurry, Red bursts into song. She’s about eight years old, but has the voice of a fifty-year-old chain-smoking lounge singer, and you can imagine her pulling off a teary rendition of “I’ve Never Been to Me.” Stinky explains the complicated plot to the Fairy of Dawn as the dog—which is always facing the wrong way or walking aimlessly off set, and is by far the best character—yawns. The Fairy of Dawn makes Tom full-sized by waving around her magic wand, which is a bunch of sparklers wired together. This is our first clue that fire safety is not a thing in Storybook Land.

Meanwhile, the Queen of Badness and her sister turn Red and Tom’s families and the other villagers into mice and monkeys, which for some reason doesn’t upset Red and Tom much at all, and Red and Tom go on a quest through the creepy forest to get into the castle, rescue Ogre and Wolf and get the potion to turn the villagers back. Red becomes entangled in a human ribcage lying on the ground (as they do), and Tom dispatches the robot from the Robot vs. the Aztec Mummy with a slingshot (recycling!).

Tom Thumb, Little Red Riding Hood, and Stinky the Skunk

They find the kidnapper at the mouth of a cave below the castle, Stinky disables him with fart power, they release a clown car’s worth of children from his sack, and the whole group go Lord of the Flies on him. 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.

Ogre and Wolf have been starving in their cell, but it doesn’t stop them from singing a song and clobbering each other with their leg irons. Mr. Carrot Head, who inexplicably eats turkey, and Mr. Two in One, have been taunting them. The Queen has Wolf and Ogre brought to the torture chamber, tied to the circular saw bench, tickle-tortured, then waterboarded until their bellies are obscenely distended. If this was supposed to be funny, they should have dialed down the screaming.

There are several more monster melees in the papier-maché cave. The battles climax in a cringe-inducing fight with a dragon that’s obviously blind, yet is armed with a flamethrower in its mouth, which our intrepid heroes and the band of near-feral kids go after with lit torches, while the dog wanders off. 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 and says she hates Red because she’s pretty, so she’s going to gouge out Red’s eyes. Because that’s the kind of thing you tell an eight-year-old in a children’s story.

Wolf, Ogre, Tom, the dog, and Stinky end up in the throne room with the Queen and Red. They 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, in its wisdom, wanders off, stage left.

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.

Somebody has put this monsterpiece on YouTube, so you, too, can experience it. It would make a great double feature with Brainiac or Aztec Mummy. Make a drinking game out of it by stirring up some margaritas and taking a swig whenever:

• Someone sings
• Stinky says something you CAN understand
• It looks like the caveman half of Mr. Two-in-One has fallen asleep
• You see something recycled from a different Murray movie (the robot isn’t the only thing)
• The dog wanders off
• Someone almost gets singed
• You laugh out loud at the sheer weirdness of it

By the end of the first 20 minutes, you’ll definitely be enjoying Little Red Riding Hood and the Monsters, even if it’s just the tequila talking. And if you’re a fan of bad movies, check out the blog posts by others participating in the So Bad It’s Good Blogathon hosted by Taking Up Room.