Blu-Ray Review: Horrible ‘Hoodwinked Too! Hood vs. Evil’

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CHICAGO – Rarely has a theatrical kids movie been more of a complete disaster than “Hoodwinked Too! Hood vs. Evil,” recently released on Blu-ray and DVD. The film was such a train wreck that it sat on the shelf for years and was unceremoniously dumped in theaters in early 2011 with nearly no marketing and no promotion. The film barely crested $10 million at the domestic box office (only 20% of the original’s take) and I feel sorry for those paying customers. This is a truly soulless, horrendous piece of animated filmmaking, one of the worst films of 2011.

Blu-Ray Rating: 1.0/5.0

Synopsis:
“The good … the bad … the Twitchy. The sequel finds our heroine, Red (Hayden Panettiere), training with a mysterious covert group called the Sisters of the Hood. But Red is forced to cut her training short when she gets an urgent call from Nick Flippers (David Ogden Stiers), the head of the super secret Happily Ever After Agency, aka HEA. A wicked witch (Joan Cusack) has abducted two innocent children, Hansel (Bill Hader) and Gretel (Amy Poehler), and Nicky needs the whole Hoodwinked gang - Red, Granny (Glenn Close), the ever-clueless Wolf (Patrick Warburton) and his over-caffeinated little partner, Twitchy (Cory Edwards) - for the search and rescue mission.”

Hoodwinked Too! Hood vs. Evil was released on Blu-ray and DVD on August 16th, 2011
Photo credit: The Weinstein Company

Why do I hate “Hoodwinked Too! Hood vs. Evil”? Let me count the ways. The title alone makes me sneer. But, all right, let’s get past the stupid branding of this thing and try and approach the actual film. What’s worse? The lackluster vocal work, in which talented actors and actresses seem to convey their awareness of the awfulness of this screenplay? Or the animation that looks worse than most video game cut scenes…in 2005? The movie simply looks awful with dull design, non-existent backgrounds, and incomprehensible action. It’s a mess.

And the script is completely uninspired. The sheer talent of the voice cast sometimes allows for a smirk (mostly courtesy of Bill Hader or Joan Cusack) but there are no laughs and kids who can see better animation and more entertaining plotting on cable at any given moment are going to give up on “Hoodwinked Too!” as quickly as their parents. There’s typically a reason a movie sits on the shelf as long as “Hoodwinked Too! Hood vs. Evil” and it’s rarely one that’s going to benefit the audience. The true shame is that this mess isn’t still gathering dust somewhere.

Special Features:
o Music Videos:
·I Can Do It Alone - Hayden Panettiere
·You Know It - Lavay Cole
·Perfect Two - CeeJ
o The Voices of Hoodwinked Too!
o Storyboard Sequences
o Production Artwork

By BRIAN TALLERICO Content Director HollywoodChicago.com brian@hollywoodchicago.com