Little Red Werewolf Slayer?

The SyFy channel (once less stupidly named SciFi) has decided that the decent reception of their Wizard of Oz reimagining, Tin Man, means they should turn out essentially the same movie over and over but with different casts of characters. They already released another movie in the same vein called Alice (I’ll let you figure out what that one’s based off) which couldn’t hold my attention for even so much as an hour.

Normally I ignore most of SyFy’s original programming (and the station in general), but something caught my notice. On their slate of faerie tales to be badly re-engineerd was Little Red Riding Hood.  Here’s a synopsis:

Red:  A young woman who is a descendant of the real Little Red Riding Hood brings her fiancé home, where he meets the family and learns about their business – hunting werewolves.  He’s skeptical until bitten by a werewolf.  When her family insists he must be killed, Red tries saving him.

Wow, that sounds original. This is the THIRD of their faerie tale films to feature the decendant or lookalike of some character from another story. (Dorothy, Alice and Little Red Riding Hood.) Not only is this concept unoriginal to them, it’s pretty unoriginal to the genre. Even 10th Kingdom (far superior to anything SyFy has made in my opinion) features a character who is pretty much the reincarnation of Snow White.

As for adding werewolves to the story of Little Red being a new twist, it isn’t. We got the Red/werewolf twist in a film called In The Company of Wolves. I’ve also seen conjecture that the originally faerie tale is actually about a werewolf (due largely to the frequent anthropomorphic portrayals of the Big Bad Wolf). Honestly, that last bit is neither here nor there. The real point is that drawing the line between Little Red Riding Hood and werewolves isn’t much of a stretch.

SyFy’s originally programming has been notoriously bad for a long time. So I guess this news should come as no shock. I’d just like to see them attempt compelling storytelling instead of shoehorning a bunch of faerie tales into the Tin Man format. Tin Man itself wasn’t bad, but there was definitely room for improvement. As for the usually shoddy special effects they employ in their Saturday night films, even those will become more tolerable if they’re incorporated into an interesting story.

Up your game SyFy and maybe people will start taking you (and your stupid name) more seriously.