Alice in Murderland

With an eye-catching title, Alice in Murderland does little (if anything) to keep its audience interested for the long haul. Written and directed by Dennis Devine (Demon Kiss), Alice in Murderland opens with the introduction of Alice's mother who is murdered while house-hunting.

Skip ahead to present day and we meet Alice, the cute and adorable Malerie Grady. Alice has a birthday coming up and her good-looking girlfriends decide to throw her a theme party – an Alice in Wonderland themed party. At the party, the guests will be given costumes that represent characters from the 1865 novel by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson.

Lucky for us, all the costumes are sexy pieces of fabric that would look right at home on any stripper stage this side of Montreal. What should be even luckier for the male geek in all of us is the fact that no members of the opposite sex are invited to the party. So if you take out the male owner of the party establishment who comes dressed as the Mad Hatter, you are left with a wet dream of a bunch of party girls dressed as stripper Tweedle-Dumb and Dee, the Red Queen and others.

But uh-oh, the Jabberwocky is also running through the halls of the building, and he/she/it is intent on leaving a trail of dead rabbit-hole characters in his wake.

What sounds like an interesting premise in the mold of some of the better horror films of the early 80's, Alice in Murderland falls flat – very flat – in overall execution.

I can assert that the blame cannot be placed on the shoulders of the cast. Each of the cast that include names you have never heard of or are likely to hear again, do an admirable job in individual emoting. But the script hardly allows anyone to exploit their inner-actor. Instead, we get mundane situations and even a fight between two girls that is as unbelievable and poorly shot as any in recent memory.

Director Dennis Devine must either have hired all family and friends for the film or he found religion somewhere along the road to the distribution as there is no nudity in a movie that screams for some titty. Even a shower scene neglects to show anything below a neckline and therefore the movie fails to titillate while failing to do just about everything else.

So characters end up living or dying and there is a stupid subplot of a rift between the girls that allows for the stereotypical separation of the pack. But pleeeeease! You want us to believe that these girls are actually friends, that they have a party for Alice at the same residence to which her mother was killed years ago (that's right folks) and that a killer wearing a Jabberwocky outfit is sneaking up on them and chopping them all to bits. Sorry. But not in my fairy tale! All this made Alice in Murderland a terrible film experience. We give it a half star for not using CGI blood, but that's about it. There is no wonder, mystery and hardly any tense-ful danger in Murderland and you should stay clear of this dud.

www.killerreviews.com

Only giving this a one because some of the actresses are attractive. They couldn't act but were nice to look at.

This movie started with an interesting idea but that's about all it has going for it. The look is distracting at best, the acting is very flat (most likely a result of script or directing limitations and not a reflection on the actors) the movie just doesn't seem to know what it wants to be and thus goes in no direction. The whole thing seems like someone said hey lets break out the camcorders and make a movie this weekend, came up with a good title and a workable story idea and then just stopped thinking at that point. The dialog alone will probably be enough to get you to shut it off about ten minutes in, if not the poor visual execution will prevent you from making it much longer.

I never, and I mean never, write reviews. This one prompted a review. This film is so bad that it approaches being comical. Unfortunately, I do not think they were trying to be campy.

The premise, the acting, the set, the special effects are terrible. There is nothing redeeming here.

For those of you who remember MST3K, Joel and the bots should be forced to watch this one!

Deciding to watch this despite clear and emphatically poor reception felt like consciously punishing myself for the mixed bag represented in other titles I'd chosen in the same night. From the very, very beginning there is an absolute lack of subtlety in the screenplay (weak overall narrative, threadbare scene writing, thin characterizations, hackneyed dialogue), camerawork, direction, editing and transitions, arrangement of scenes, blood effects and gore, costume design, choreography, acting, and music. In every possible way the production feels purely amateurish - a first student film, perhaps, created by barely attentive beginners; a passion project among friends, except with scarcely any passion, fun, or active interest from anyone involved; or a schlocky, low-grade, themed porn flick, except without any nudity.

Considering the dialogue, the other features of filmmaker Dennis Devine, the wardrobe selections generally, and an early scene in which every female character is dressed only in a bikini - the latter comparison seems most apt.

'Alice in Murderland' is pointedly terrible, nearly entirely bereft of all value. There's infinitesimally little praise I can offer, but I find myself surprised that I've any at all. Against all odds, there's a single unexpected turn in the plot. There's an iota of cleverness in the sudden disappearances and reappearances of the "Cheshire Cat," Kat - though the underlying predictability is rotten. The characterizations of "Tweedledum" and "Tweedledee," or Donna and Dee, allow actresses Heath Butler and Jennifer Field to wholly lean into the vapid ignorance of the roles. And the latter lends to the single laugh that the entire movie provided in a small exchange of dialogue: "Where's Donna?" "Glued to the toilet." "Oh. Of course she is."

What's remarkable is that I gather a minor sense that the cast are genuinely capable actresses. Bad acting is one matter; acting under the strict terms and guidance of a director is another. The two are certainly distinct, and I'm inclined to think in this case the latter is true. Moreover, to glance at their collective credits reveals some tawdry nonsense much like Devine's oeuvre, yes, but also a number of recognizable films and series that can't be a mistake. To that point: The only reason I stumbled across this title in the first place was that I greatly admired the performance in the outstanding 2019 short film 'Nova' of Kelly Kula, and in browsing her credits, found she featured here as Kat. Yet suffice to say, 'Alice in Murderland' is a far cry from that fantastic horror short, or pretty much anything else. Devine's writing and direction forces everyone involved into such abjectly blunt, forthright, unsubtle, over the top, tacky performances that it's extremely difficult to truly distinguish, on the basis of this feature alone, who may or may not have real acting skill, were they given opportunity to demonstrate it.

I'll allow this: I don't know if Devine is just that awful of a filmmaker, or if every unseemly flaw of the picture is intentional. Considering how many other movies he's made, I suppose it's hard to think that he altogether doesn't know what he's doing. Yet if the horridly tedious pablum is knowing and willful, making a deliberately rancid movie - job well done, I guess, but why? To what purpose?

There is, I dare say, a tiny modicum of fun to be had in the final length of the feature, and again, there are a few elements that seem marginally worthwhile, at least by comparison. This isn't the absolute worst movie I've ever seen - but it's close enough. Any positivity is overwhelmed and subsumed in the grotesquely dull, possibly premeditated mediocrity that the film otherwise represents. What minuscule value one may find here is not worth sitting through these 90 minutes, especially not with so many other fine movies available to watch. A few pinpricks of light are not remotely enough to redeem the dark void of shallow, uninteresting, and vulgarly, garishly blatant rubbish that is 'Alice in Murderland.'

You've been warned.