ALICE IN TERRORLAND (2024)

New On Demand from High Fliers Films!
Directed/Written by Richard John Taylor.
Starring Lizzy Willis, Rula Lenska, Jon-Paul Gates, Steve Wraith, Lila Sarner, Nigel Troup, Rikki Kimpton, Nikol Atanasova
Check out the trailer here!!

After her family dies in a fire, Alice (Lizzy Willis) goes to stay with her grandmother Beth (Rula Lenska). Almost immediately, Alice falls ill and begins hallucinating that she is living out Lewis Carroll’s famous novel Alice in Wonderland. But are these fever dreams all in Alice’s head or are they really happening to the troubled girl?

ALICE IN TERRORLAND is a bare bones retelling of the Lewis Carroll classic and set in the modern age. Bare bones means that it relies on very little effects, preferring to represent the highly fantastical characters that populate Wonderland as realistic and down to earth characters. So, the Cheshire Cat is a woman bound in a straight-jacket. The Walrus is a big sloppy guy who abducts women. The White Rabbit is a serial killer in a bunny mask. The Caterpillar is a psychiatrist who blows smoke into Alice’s face. And the Red Queen is Alice’s grandmother who likes to play cards and gets more demanding as Alice’s stay grows. I’m all for different takes on the classics, but ALICE IN TERRORLAND sadly doesn’t push the envelope far enough. Basically, the characters sit in dimly lit rooms spouting quotes from Alice in Wonderland and that’s pretty much it. Sure the effects were side-stepped because this is a low budget movie, but in many cases, little to no costuming, which is much more affordable, is used in a creative manner. So it’s just a bunch of people quoting Carroll’s lines. The film is very short in length, just over an hour and ten minutes, so the actors spout their classic lines and the story breezes off the next encounter for Alice. It follows the story pretty closely, though there are significant deviations here and there.

The saving grace of ALICE IN TERRORLAND is that the acting is pretty solid. I’ve never seen any of these actors before, but they do a good job selling the lines as Alice descends deeper into madness. Then again this is a UK film, and I always find that actors with a haughty English accent sound more convincing, so maybe it’s just their accent that makes it seem to me like they are better actors than the run of the mill fare we get in American films.

While the script borrows heavily from Carroll’s words, at least writer/director Richard John Taylor offers up some interesting cinematography. There are some scenes like the slo-mo shots of burning objects in the inferno that Alice survives at the beginning that elevate this film a bit. Drone shots over an expansive forest make the setting seem mysterious and vast as well. So at least this is a professionally produced movie, for the most part.

But there needs to be more than simply reading Carroll’s lines and putting clown makeup on everyone to really stand out as a memorable adaptation of the classic. ALICE IN TERRORLAND went for the basic approach and while it might work as a stage-play, I feel this attempt came up lacking in enough creativity to bring something new. This one goes more for the psychological horror approach and sometimes it can be effectively creepy, as Carroll’s story often is. This is by no means a bad film, as production and acting make it look and sound good. I just think if you’re going to adapt Alice in Wonderland, you have to swing for the fences and this is a much more subtle rendition.