Wendy Darling strikes out in an attempt to rescue her brother Michael from the clutches of the evil Peter Pan who intends to send him to Neverland. Along the way she meets a twisted Tinkerbell, who...
So…..another Disney public domain horror movie greets us in these indecent times: “Peter Pan: Neverland Nightmare”. At this point, watching these films has become the weirdest waiting game ever: you’re hoping these films crash and burn but you can’t help but stick around and see if it surprises you. As the next installment in the Poohniverse….
…I can only blame myself for hyping myself up for this to mean something.
Allow me to preface this before I get down to the nitty gritty: making a horror version of Peter Pan holds a lot more promise than I initially thought. When you consider that the original J.M. Barrie story more or less had Peter being a complete sociopath—kidnapping little kids, separating them from their parents forever and then banishing or killing them once they hit puberty—this story is much easier to transition into horror than Pooh (although given Peter Pan’s been in public domain longer, there are already plenty of darker iterations of this story). So suffice to say, leave it to everyone in tow to do what they’ve done to the previous movies so far: rip away the escapist essence of the original Peter Pan and follow the most stock, formulaic kidnapping-thriller blueprint down to the letter. This is practically nothing short of a garden variety slasher that constantly trades meaning for shock value when it absolutely didn’t need to and by sticking to the straight-and-narrow, practically dilutes the few veneers of competence this production has going for it.
Derivative at best and lousy at worst, bio-fascination can only take this protracted set-up so far between the icky subject matter regarding child murder, logic gaps big enough to pierce through the stratosphere and a third act that stretches out the climax to a glacially drawn-out trudge; all of which inevitably compounds how surprisingly boring the entire endeavor becomes once the disconcerting smoke and mirrors fades away. It does have one twist that admittedly took me back by surprise and added the flimsiest of connective tissue to this world but if you were to watch this on mute with zero context, you’d hardly tell this was a Peter Pan movie.
Witnessing a version of Peter Pan seeking young boys to send to Neverland so that they’ll be protected from the malice of this world is both comical in its blatant hypocrisy and somewhat terrifying because I can see the gears turning behind this idea: accentuate his arrested development with adolescence and crank it up to it’s most natural conclusion. He genuinely is a loose cannon with a soliloquy fetish and loves the thrill of danger, unable to see other people as people and can’t tell the difference between real life and playing pretend but I just wish they went further with it by going the Hook route, i.e, him choosing to stay in the real world only to be driven mad and kills to maintain his own sanity. Just a little bit of backstory like in the Pooh films would’ve made a world of difference.
Scott Chambers makes for a decent actor but I’m not sure if that carries over to the scene-by-scene intricacies of directing. He does give off brief snippets of a murder mystery documentary format that feels very par of the course and structurally sound but outside these little quirks, his directing is every bit as straightforward as Rhys’ Waterfield’s previous efforts and it hardly gives this project any potential to realize.
Operating on a microbudget means the imagination of the production design is going to be highly skewed no matter how you slice it and taking the bleak presentation into account, almost none of these settings are visually enticing to look or feel disarranged enough to reflect on our character’s increasing deterioration of safety. It also suffers the same problems as Tarot where the scope or scale keeps clashing with the hypothetical worldbuilding and feels too sparse for what little characters they do have. Sure, not everything is structured this time to where the action has to escalate quickly but the trade-off for that is milquetoast editing and stock framework, muted lighting and low energy from Vince Knight’s cinematography.
Pacing is mostly consistent in sloth only to kneecap what little tension there is, costume design is rather ugly to look at, barely any of Greg Birkumshaw’s scoring remotely stands out, the sound design is even less remarkable and while its tone leans very hard towards and embraces hints of B-movie luridness, its insistence to double down on the ultra serious without cracking down on a consistent rhythm continues to be a double edged sword for this series; Peter Pan’s entire lore is baked in the supernatural so not being able to fulfill those lofty ambitions (probably due to the budget) is a massive handicap to the movie’s potential. Speaking of which, said budget is respectable enough for what they cobbled together while its actual acts of violence are two-faced. While this continues the series’s track record of flashy ingenuity behind some of the kills, the gore is also gratuitous in how desperately it imitates Terrifier which leads to a few sequences that border on tasteless.
Practical effects and gore are spot on still, so at least the R-rating is alive and well.
Much of the acting gets a B for effort and a C in execution, hampered by milquetoast, on-the-nose dialogue and rather dull characters let down by the constant “wallow in misery” approach to them. Megan Placito is a competent lead, Kit Green actually plays this tormented iteration of Tinkerbell pretty well and you can tell Martin Portlock is trying, the man’s commitment to being as nasty and creepy as possible does show some range but imitation is not the sincerest form of flattery in this case; even looking past all that, this iteration of Peter lacks the panache of first-string psychopaths and isn’t scary or intimidating enough to be taken seriously.
It’s not that I want to jive with this series but if this film is of any indication of the direction for the rest of the Poohniverse, part of me hopes another slight course correction is down the line because “Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare” doesn’t feel like fun. Opting to ditch schlocky, campy fantasy in favor of trying to tell a darker story is admirable and I’ll take effort over greed any day but to what end?
