“Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare” is Better Than It Has Any Right To Be

Jagged Edge Productions has been working fast at capitalizing on all the intellectual properties that have hit the public domain in recent years. Say what you will about it. Maybe you’re one who believes Winnie the Pooh should remain a lovable yellow bear who eats honey and loves Christopher Robin, or maybe you simply believe the idea of giving a horror twist to the character is fundamentally stupid.

Personally, I won’t fault you for either opinion.

I read a comment recently that made a good point: “Great. Now, children can’t Google search Winnie the Pooh anymore.” It’s unfortunate when you look at it like that. Still, I do believe that things should exist in the public domain, and that means that storytellers and filmmakers should be able to take the concept whichever direction they so choose. And even still, things are parodied all the time, either unofficially or officially. Pinocchio had a horror film a couple decades ago, and children still, very much, can Google search Pinocchio. In culture, the cream tends to rise to the top, and, by that, I mean, culture tends to remember what it prefers to remember.

Nay, my biggest issue with Jagged Edge Productions’ first film wasn’t that it took a beloved character like Winnie the Pooh and went and made him all mean-like. Rather, it’s that they did so badly. Personally, I thought the concept of Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey sounded like a fun slasher film. Unfortunately, what it amounted to was a mediocre, cheaply-made film that failed to reach the concept’s potential. However, fortunately for director Rhys Frake-Waterfield, it did not fail to recoup its budget and then some. Thus, a sequel was created and released a year later.

Now, I haven’t talked about that film yet on Readers Digested, but it was alright! It had Tigger doing a Freddy Krueger impression, had improved production-values, and was an all-around improvement over its predecessor. Even if it wasn’t a great film by any stretch of the imagination, I can’t help but think it righted the ship, so to speak, on The Twisted Childhood Universe (or Pooh-niverse, as I’d much prefer not to call it). The concept of the Twisted Childhood is inherently goofy, camp, fun, and I wanted to get behind the series, but if all it had in-store for me was ‘so bad, it’s good’ quality filmmaking, I knew I wouldn’t be on-board.

It seems the company took the criticisms to heart. Either that, or with newfound revenue, they were able to more closely depict their initial vision. At any rate, I go into Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare in good faith and optimistically.

This new film is directed by Scott Chambers (instead of Rhys), a producer of the first Blood and Honey, he also plays Christopher Robin in the sequel. As a filmmaker, his resume is sparse, with Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare acting as his feature film debut.

As you undoubtedly would surmise from the trailers, Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare is a horrific take on J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan story, depicting a demented, unhinged version of Peter Pan. His mission statement is simple – bring children to Neverland. Where is Neverland? Well, … maybe the true Neverland is the friends we made along the way. Either that, or maybe Peter Pan is a lunatic and Neverland is him zapping the life out of children. Either way, much like the first Blood and Honey, Neverland Nightmare takes a fairly novel concept and brings it to about exactly where you would expect for an indie horror film.

That in mind, it is light years ahead of the first Winnie the Pooh movie, and although it isn’t as fun as the second Winnie film, it is a more cohesive experience overall. The Blood and Honey sequel had the misfortune of having to account for the sins of its predecessor, whereas this film is able to build from scratch.

The production value and cinematography is well accomplished and properly atmospheric, relative to its budget. It doesn’t have a whole, whole lot of shots I would single out or dignify mentioning, but I think they did really well. It wouldn’t look at all out of place watching Neverland Nightmare alongside the average horror film that shows up at the cinema (take that as you will). It’s worth mentioning, because that is one of the places where the original Winnie the Pooh film struggled with frantic camerawork and bad lighting making it difficult to follow along. No such problem with this film.

As prefaced, the film sees Peter Pan as something of a child-abducting serial killer (all signs suggest ol’ Petey is a lunatic just offing children, but the director has spoken about Neverland being an actual place that exists in some form – potentially in a sequel). He brings with him his pal Tinker Bell, a drug addict who has, more or less, been brainwashed into helping Peter do his cruel acts. The film’s main protagonist is a woman named Wendy Darling who blames herself for her little brother’s kidnapping, with the whole town in a state of panic. Megan Placito plays Wendy and is satisfactory in the role, even if she isn’t given a whole, whole lot to work beyond the fact that her mother also blames her for her little brother’s kidnapping and is so hateful and mean-spirited you would think she was plucked from a Rob Zombie film.

The film wears its influences on its sleeve, and, to be honest, there are a lot of them. Most, if not all of them, would stand as just different enough to beat a courtroom, but the influences are obvious straightaway. The story itself is shades of The Black Phone and The Grabber snatching up children and locking them away – a story concept that has been done many times before The Black Phone, of course. Our antagonist Peter Pan dons face paint that resembles a more muted interpretation of Phoenix’s The Joker and speaks with a cadence that resembles the shouting, whispering inflection of Ledger’s The Joker. The fact that Peter Pan is meant to be a mime makes little difference to the hand-me-down character traits. Also, there is a scene at the beginning with Peter Pan talking to a small boy (James Hook, har har) from the inside of a cracked open basement door that draws a fairly clear parallel to the beginning of It where Pennywise does the same from a sewer. Again, none of it is necessarily damnable, but it would take a lot of suspension of disbelief for the average movie buff not to draw the same conclusions.

As a film, it’s decent, if, a little bit predictable and too self-serious for its own good.

Generally speaking, I actually like it when these sort of oddball horror films try to play it as straight as they can. I don’t invest in the ‘it’s so bad, it’s good’ principle of filmmaking, and more so believe that when I enjoy a film, it’s because I found something good, be it charm, ambition, or enthusiasm that helps it outweigh whatever inherent problems it may have. Take any film from early Full Moon Features, for example. If they verged into self-parody and intentionally tried to make you laugh at their incompetence, their magic would run out fast. Even if Re-Animator was campy at times, they owned the concept and Herbert West was a mad scientist whose obsession had gotten him into a bad situation. This film does well at making Peter Pan feel like a serious threat, and Martin Portlock does well, both at doing an impression of iconic characters, and at giving Peter a presence of his own.

Still, the film comes as tonally dissonant from what the greater series is trying to accomplish (a campy, fun, but deliberately lowbrow riff on classic characters) and has a plot that takes things in the most obvious possible directions (before this film, if you Googled fan fiction for a horror story about Peter Pan – most of the entries would be something close to this). It is all a logical way to produce a horror film out of Peter Pan, but I would argue it’s not an incredibly unique one. That … might be the reoccurring point to make about the film. It isn’t bad. In fact, it’s pretty good given where the series started. It doesn’t embarrass itself or do anything to make itself live in infamy like other films like it, and feels like a real earnest effort at making a Peter Pan horror film. Unfortunately, a lot of what it does (and does well) feels familiar or uninteresting.

By the end, I would say my overall impression of Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare is positive, all things considered. It won’t be an entry in the Nightmare Deck, but I think they took a rather novel concept and did pretty well with it.

As a first time director, Scott Chambers did really well, and, given how Winnie 2 was miles ahead of the first, I hope he has a chance to refine the character with a sequel. As a film, I would put this over what Damien Leone did with the first Terrifier, and, on an even more epic-scale, we saw a dramatic improvement with Damien Leone’s work on Terrifier 2.

Good luck, guys.

I’ll be watching.