Riese: Kingdom Falling

With Warner Bros releasing their new Red Riding Hood movie, I thought I'd take this week to look at some of the previous versions of Little Red in film.

While it's not strictly a LRRH retelling, Riese: Kingdom falling does borrow heavily from Red's imagery, from the wolf to the red hood to being lost in the forest. Think LRRH meets Game of Thrones meets Steampunk.

Riese is the lost princess, escaped into the woods and isolation after her family were killed in a coup by her aunt. She's traveling, trying to survive and help people when she can without too much risk to herself. The show starts with a bounty hunter on her tail, and when she's injured she seeks refuge in a small town that seems peaceful, until she investigates more closely.

This is a very cool show, especially because it started as an independent internet effort. It's since been ... bought? backed? by SyFy, so I'm interested in seeing how it develops from this point forward. Aside from some heavy and unnecessary narration, the writing up until now has been interesting, the storyline developing over the course of ten five-to-eight minute episodes. So far it all feels very prologue-y, which may have to do with the fact that the episodes are so short, or perhaps because there's only been about 40 minutes of actual episode.

It's available to watch now on SyFy (if you can handle Syfy.com's obnoxious advertisements) or you can find episodes on hulu.