Directed by Richard John Taylor
Starting off our week of Public Domain Horror, we have an adaptation of one of the most celebrated and recognized pieces of English literature, Alice in Wonderland! With countless adaptations, crossovers, and reimaginings, Alice In Terrorland continues a long tradition of playing around with the classic tale, but is it a quality addition to this already crowded field? Let’s get into it!
After a house fire results in the tragic deaths of her parents, young Alice moves into the decaying estate occupied by her grandmother Beth. Soon after, Alice is stricken by a mysterious illness, which her grandmother tries to soothe by reading her the story of Alice in Wonderland. This may not be helping Alice though, as the lines between reality and fiction begin to blur.
I need to get this out of the way early on, Alice in Terrorland is bad. Really bad. No wishy-washy, ‘Oh if they changed this or that then maybe it could have been decent,’ this is ‘scrap the whole project and start over’ bad. Before I get to the specifics of how this fails, and oh boy will I get there, I will point out the one positive, which is the performances from the two leads playing Alice and Beth. Their performances are far and away the best thing about the movie, and if they had a better script or direction, this may have been a salvageable production. Unfortunately, they didn’t.
Getting into why this is so bad requires a little bit of explanation, because it isn’t just one thing, it’s a combination of elements starting with the completely lifeless cinematography. Almost all the sequences here are shot the same way, with shot reverse shots of people’s heads as they speak with each other. Focusing on one person saying a line then switching to the other saying a line, fully zoomed in the people’s faces during all of this, is one of the most boring ways to frame dialogue, and it reduces acting to reading lines off a script. So much of the movie is shot this way, and I suspect it was done to hide the fact that, aside from the old estate, there aren’t any sets to speak of, with very few shooting locations being used as well. To hide everything looking the same, they just zoomed in on the faces or masks of all the new characters to tell you that something is definitely happening!
Also, there’s nothing wrong with putting a darker spin on an older source material, but it all depends on how that’s done. Having all the classic Alice in Wonderland characters show up and have the twist be ‘oh this is the Cheshire Cat but she’s a murderer called the Cheshire Slasher’ or ‘here’s the Mad Hatter but he’s even crazier!’ feels less like a complete thought and more like an edgy reinterpretation for shock value. By the end of the movie when the secrets get revealed, they bring up way more questions than answers, and I was just happy that the experience was over. One final point in the movie’s favor though, it had a set of adorable kittens.
