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.
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