Oh, wait a minute, I'm thinking of "Big Head Todd and the Monsters", not Little Red Riding Hood and the Monsters! My mistake. Sorry about that Mexico, I didn't mean to mix up one of your bat-shit loco fairy tale acid trips with a forgettable band from the frozen tits of nowhere. They probably stole their name from you too, damn ass beans. Speaking of beans and all their refried goodness, this gag is running way too long and I think it's about time we crossed the boarder and got this review thing on its legs! Vaminos!

The first thing that slaps up upside our collective faces is the credit of this being a K. Gordon Murray production, which means we'd all better slip the little white tabs on our tongues and prepare for a blast-off into awesomeness. For anyone who needs a refresher, Mr. K. Gordon was the same lunatic who brought to the Home of the Brave another Tomb red-eye train to Crazyville we all remember as Santa Claus. And we all remember that, don't we? Santa running a child slavery ring out of his big castle in Heaven, where he employed the dark magicks of Merlin the magician to peep on the denizens of Earth whenever his voyeuristic side started to itch, carpet bombing the globe with his army of cybernetic hellbeast albino reindeer, and fighting with Satan for the rights to who gets to kill the children and eat their souls first? Yeah, it's kinda hard to unsee a bad trip like that, no matter how much your Psychiatrist tells you it was just a movie. Fuckin' Hell.

The world our movies takes place in is populated entirely by storybook characters, and is divided into both an evil half and a good half, where the various heroes and villains live. Apparently there is no "happy medium" section, or a "conscientious objectors" place for all of the ancillary characters from these stories to chill, so it looks like this really is a morally cemented "black & white" type of place. Our story starts on the bad side of the tracks, where an ogre and werewolf are brought up on charges of being nice to children. Dracula (in all his top-hatted, mustachioed, and plastic fanged glory) serves as prosecutor, while a not-evil-looking-enough witch is the duo's defense attorney. Serving on the "impartial" jury, we've got a guy in a sombrero who kidnaps kids and makes stew out of 'em ("because they're tender, and make good broth!"); the worst version of Frankenstein's Monster I've seen since, well, the last time I saw a Mexican movie with the Frankenstein Monster in it; a guy called "Carrot Head" who looks like the pinhead from Freaks (except that his head is apparently full of water?!) with a set of eyebrows that put my own Cro-Magnon uni-brow to shame; a conjoined twin made up of a bald goon and a Chinese caveman; and a dude who breathes windstorms and looks like David Crosby after his worst bender. An audience of dime store monstrosities (and a fucking killer robot!) play witness to the trial, while presiding over the court is the "Queen of Badness", also know as Snow White's wicked stepmonster. And it's a good thing that Walt Disney's army of fetus devouring lawyers aren't allowed past the US borders either cuz, copyrights be damned, this woman looks exactly like Disney’s version!

The best/worst part of all this of course is the fact that everybody sings during the trial scene, so you feel like you've fallen into the middle of a bad Halloween episode of "Cop Rock" where they're paying tribute to Santo movies! I'm starting to think that there was a FedEx fuck up and the crew got a special delivery from Colombia rather than the box of props they ordered...

The trial is just Dracula and the werewolf shouting random accusations at each other, including something about Dracula sucking off the witch because she ate all of his victims (no fucking idea), before the Queen finally condemns the accused to death by giant circular saw at the next full moon, i.e. in four days. Nearby, Tom Thumb and Red Riding Hood, the kids that Wolfy and the Ogre ("on 107.3 in the mornings!") are supposed to have aided, cavort around and sing a duet in the forest. When they're done singing and it's time to leave the scene, Red calls for her dog Duke to come with them. Duke is up and ready to go too... because he's chasing after a treat bouncing across the set, thrown by an off-screen stagehand. I feel the receptors in my noggin trying to shut off in an effort to prevent potentially harmful brain damage from further viewing of this movie, so if I doze off for a few hours here or there, that's why. Anyway, Tom and Red are joined by their giant humanoid skunk friend Stinky (who's also the Wolf's apprentice), who jumps around like a crack addict on payday and talks like a heavily caffeinated chipmunk. He brings word of the Bad Queen's intentions to execute Wolfy and the Ogre, as well as an additional plot to turn all of the people at Red and Tom's village into mice and chimps by spiking the water supply with purple Kool-Aid, dry ice, and the magic words, "Poochy, poochy, poochy". I've had hallucinations brought on by prolonged exposure to film developing chemicals that made more sense than whatever's happening in this flick...

Having poisoned the river, BQ then uses her control of THE SUN to make things hotter for everyone so they'll be inclined to quench their thirsts with river water, enough so that they completely ignore that the water's turned red, which is the type of omen some religions would take for the coming of the apocalypse... or at least as evidence that a group of women on their period had been swimming in there and it's probably time to find a new water supply... With the village mutated like Ninja Turtles, Red wants to confront BQ and see if a little goody-two-shoes talk can convince her to change everyone back. Not exactly a sound strategy, Stinky asks that she reconsider so BQ doesn't turn them into worms or talcum powder (?!). Instead, he suggests they head out to find the Fairy of Dawn to see if she can't reverse the spell. Meanwhile, Wolfy and the Ogre bide the time till their execution by singing jolly songs about eating babies and their inevitable deaths by spinning jagged steel wheel mutilation.

Finding Miss Dawn with relative ease, our heroes are blessed by the Fairy queen's enchanted 4th of July sparkler wand (good thing too, cuz it was quickly burning out by the end of the scene...), giving them protection from BQ's powers and growing Tom to normal size so Red and Stinky don't need to stop every five minutes and tell him to get his ass in gear... and to keep the production from hemorrhaging pesos on all of Tom's super-imposed perspective scenes. In BQ's evil kingdom, the kids fight a killer robot (that even the Aztec Mummy wouldn't have much trouble stopping), then they save a mob of kids from the pedophile chef with the giant butterfly net before turning him into a meat piñata. Back in the dungeon, Wolfy and the Ogre are doing kinky stuff like rubbing hot wax on each other and reciting poetry. I feel so dirty watching this...

When BQ's minions fail to stop the heroes, she goes to Satan for help... by asking him to speed up the full moon so she can execute the two fruit baskers in her dungeon... What the fuck?! First off, the bitch can't even kill a pair of kids and their retarded skunk. Second, instead of asking Satan to kill them, she instead asks him to speed up time so she can kill the Wolf and Ogre ahead of schedule?! Couldn't she just kill them and get it over with!? Fuck her edict about the full moon and all that crap, YOU'RE EVIL! YOU DON'T FOLLOW RULES! JUST KILL THEM NOW!

Wolfy and the Ogre make their escape thanks to a story about a millionaire parasite and a learning disability that leaves Carrot Head with the common sense of a 4 year old. The duo are headed off at the pass by mutant David Crosby and a gang of extras in the same cheap-ass costumes you find for half-off on the racks at your local drugstore the day after Halloween. "Fighting" ensues, during which the Ogre tosses a mannequin at another monster, only to have the mannequin's rubber mask come flying off on impact. The two escapees are recaptured anyway, making this whole sequence a veritable waste of time with the exception of reminding us just how bad this movie is. After several minutes of threatening to carve the two up into bullion cubes, their captors remember that they're in a children’s story and instead put them through the tickle torture... yep, no yanking out toenails or breaking teeth or castration or anything brutal, just feathers on feet... This is followed by forcing them to drink a lot of water. Okay, so they graduate from big brother bullying to frat boy hazing?! Is this a torture chamber or a Three Stooges skit? It's amazing sometimes how exhausting it is just to watch a damn movie.

Elsewhere, the kids beat up the gale barfing Mexican non-union equivalent of George "the Animal" Steel, gagging him with a snot rag while Red pulls out his chest hairs, then cracks his skull with a wooden club. Damn, that red hood must be her gang colors or something! Girl plays for keeps! Anyway, the kids save their grown up monster pals by turning their jailers' retardation against them. Red gets nabbed by BQ and her half-wit sister while the others wallop Dracula, tussle with Frankenstein, and bludgeon a fire-breathing dragon to death when the kids that Tom and Red saved from the cannibal pedophile earlier come back to lend a hand. Boy those Mexican kids sure do love their piñatas. Ultimately, BQ is defeated by a game of Keep Away and a gateway to Hell (don't ask), her dumb-ass sister becomes a good girl and helps turn the townsfolk into people again, and the evil half of the world and all of its inhabitants are consumed by the purifying tongue of the inferno. Remember kids, all it takes to save the world from evil is the simultaneous immolation of its practitioners and their homelands. Well, at least that's what Bush thinks... and I don't mean Gavin Rosdale's defunct band mates. Anyway, then Jesus comes down from Heaven on his magical waterslide built of children’s innocence and dreams, and everybody gathers around to eat S'mores and do the Mexican Hat Dance. The end.

People like to say that the Japanese are all insane, but I'd like to think that our impoverished neighbors to the South give them a run for their psychosis sandwiches… although this Japanese commercial version of Red Riding Hood is so much creepier in its own way… I think it’s an advert for a plastic surgeon’s office or something… Whatever the case, Little Red Riding Hood and the Monsters is very similar to Santa Claus in that it’s not only elfshit crazy, but it’s also a chore to trudge through at times. It took me three sittings to watch this movie through the first time, and a whole lot of caffeine to keep me awake through one straight viewing the second. Too much time killing goes on and the buffoonery grates after a while. I have nothing against buffoonery mind you, I’ve been a tried and true Three Stooges viewer since birth, but slapstick without the comedy is just a trial. *YAWN* But, if you’ve got anyone else to play off of and a little something to help along the warping of the senses, then LRRHatM isn’t so much a movie as it is an experience that you should check out if you can get your hands on it. Weird and freaky for the sake of entertaining the drunk and stoned.