I watched Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare for you.
A worthy successor to Winnie the Pooh and Blood & Honey 2, I haven’t yet taken the plunge into horror movies about Bambi or Popeye.
I’ve decided to give myself a little breathing room and enjoy life.
We joke, but Peter Pan could have done well.
Okay, not with that budget and the choice of actors for independent films in England, let’s be real here, but there was something to the story.
Faithful lore in a gritty world
I thought the script would go for the supernatural, to justify Neverland and the lost children, for example, and not that they would anchor the story in the real world.
It was a very good choice on their part. Kudos.
I really like unsettling adaptations of classics.
One of my favorite miniseries is the zany, dystopian version of Alice in Wonderland that aired on Sci-Fi in 2009, where the Mad Hatter’s tea is human emotions, that are sold to the highest bidder.
Plus, Kathy Bates plays the Queen of Hearts in it, so they really wanted my attention.
I’m fairly easy to please when it comes to her.
For Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare, rather than going overboard with special effects that would have been too expensive given the film’s micro budget, they decided to make Peter a deranged killer who kidnaps and murders children to send them to Neverland, where they will never grow up.
Technically speaking, it works and follows the lore.
The lead actor doesn’t act terribly badly, neither does Wendy, and the actress playing Tinkerbell also does a very decent job. We get their characters and motivation.
The bane of child actors
But as we know, the bane of all low-budget horror movies is casting children.
And here, it’s sadly a bitter failure.
Whether it’s Michael or Joey, it’s just hell. Seeing them act completely takes us out of the story.
It’s a shame because, once again, the premise had incredible potential.
Fairy dust you say ?
The trans Tinkerbell who injects herself with heroin thinking it’s fairy dust is something semi-realistic.
It’s very real world coded.
The Jared Leto-style arm in Requiem for a Dream is a great effect in a horror movie !
The family murders are really well done too, but where I have a much harder time is that at some point they must have realized they had fake blood leftover in the budget and decided to veer into the realm of Terrifier 2.
They cut off limbs, stick objects into arteries and pull them out, limp a little after getting a piece of glass in their foot, and that’s where the whole credibility of the effort goes out the window.
Putting gore before the story is what ruined the ending for me.
Creative choices ?
I do wonder, though, what the movie would have been like with a flawless cast and more funding.
I loved the appearance of Hook, and that we are left to guess what happened to him.
The theme is dark and unhealthy. The brits are great at that. It’s reminiscent of Mum & Dad in the way it’s just dank.
We can imagine what Peter must have gone through when we see him naked, and we almost understand why he separates the children from their parents…
The mask, on the other hand, is a little too reminiscent of The Black Phone.
In 2025, it’s tricky to create content from scratch without drawing inspiration from something else, but here the references remind us too much of higher-quality films, which detracts a little from this one.
And what about the audience? Well, they give it an average rating, or close. Some liked it, others panned it.
Films of this genre have a target audience, and those who are unfamiliar with low-budget horror remakes of Winnie the Pooh, Popeye, Bambi, or Steamboat Willie will have no idea what they’re getting into, and as a result, the rating will be awful, which is explainable.
It’s not the worst, it’s not the best. It’s doing a good job given the circumstances.
Second star to the right, and straight on to streaming.
My rating: 2/5 bats
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