I can't say I was too surprised upon starting Alice in Terrorland to see it mentioned that it was inspired by Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland novel. Written and directed by Richard John Taylor (Muse), this uses many elements of that story, including lines of dialogue and characters, albeit with a horror twist.
Alice (Lizzy Willis - The Picture of Dorian Gray) is sent to an orphanage after her parents die in a house fire, and it is some point later that she discovers she has a grandma, Beth (Rula Lenska - Inside No.9 TV series). Ruth invites the girl to come live with her in her dilapidated mansion out in the country. The woman believes the place to have once belonged to Lewis Carroll, and as a result she is obsessed with his works. With Alice falling mysteriously ill and becoming bed bound, Ruth decides to read her Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, hoping the story will help her rest and recover. Each time Alice falls asleep, she dreams that she is encountering twisted real life versions of the characters from the story, and it is these characters who begin to plant suspicions in Alice's mind that things in the real world might not be exactly as they seem.
For some reason, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland has inspired many horror based interpretations to it, and many of those were video games. Alice is Dead, American McGee's Alice, and Alice: Madness Returns all put a sinister vibe on the classic story, with the later even sharing the same traumatic event of a house fire that killed the protagonist's parents. This made Alice in Terrorland not feel as fresh a spin on the classic story as it might otherwise have done. It felt like the movie wanted to be arthouse, and there were some strange decisions made to put that on that particular path. Most egregious of these was the slow and dull opening sequence that over the course of around seven long dragged out minutes nearly sent me to sleep. Everything up to Alice arriving at Ruth's house is displayed weirdly, dialogue free and with random images that did nothing to excite me for what was to come. Thankfully, aside from a much shorter epilogue, the film mainly stayed more traditional.
Being an indie film there are not wild scenes of action and spectacle, nor are the wild characters encountered in their more fantastical forms. The film is split between the real world and Wonderland, the later consisting of rooms in the house and nearby woodland where Alice converses with characters and not much else. The iconic characters are reimagined as humanoid versions of themselves, and I will add that I thought these Wonderland characters were on the whole fantastic. The March Hare (Steve Wraith) is a man wearing a rabbit mask who has a penchant for murdering people who are late for instance. In fact, many of these reimaginings have turned the characters into killers, such as The Walrus (Rikki Kimpton), a man whose bullying as a child (due to his perceived likeness to a walrus), led to him becoming a cannibalistic serial killer, and The Cheshire Ripper (Nikol Atanasova), a girl with Joker-like scarring who feels the need to do the same to her victims faces. My favourite was Jon-Paul Gates (Haunted 5: Phantoms, Haunted 4: Demons) as The Mad Hatter who was equal parts intimidating and endearing. By comparison Alice is quite a bland forgettable girl, but that is always the point, to contrast her normalness with the insanity going on around her. I also found Ruth's somewhat stereotypical kindly grandmother routine to be a bit unexciting.
Outside of the fact that Alice is becoming gravely ill in the real world, there was never any feeling of peril for her when she is in the dreamworld, the encounters all consist purely of her talking with characters, with them never acting like they are going to do anything to her. I get this was likely due to the low budget, but the way the film picks and chooses what random parts of the book to include led to not much excitement happening here.
Outside of the fact that Alice is becoming gravely ill in the real world, there was never any feeling of peril for her when she is in the dreamworld, the encounters all consist purely of her talking with characters, with them never acting like they are going to do anything to her. I get this was likely due to the low budget, but the way the film picks and chooses what random parts of the book to include led to not much excitement happening here.
Alice in Terrorland did have a great cast of actors who played their eccentric performances perfectly. In terms of the story this wasn't as good, the story leads up to a revelation that was supremely obvious, making the journey feel a little bit wasted. With more going on rather than random conversations this might have been able to capture my imagination more, but it was obvious where this was heading, leading me feeling like it was perfectly fine as a movie, but not really anything special. Alice in Terrorland is due for release from High Flier Films.
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