Just the Ticket #203: Peter Pan's Neverland Nightmare

Article by Sean Wilkinson,

Trying to think Happy Thoughts....

I can't fly, Ticketholders, especially not for today's in-flight fustercluck of an entry in the Twisted Childhood Universe. At least it's better than the first Blood & Honey...but that's a low bar that doesn't require magic or stellar navigation to clear.

Peter Pan's Neverland Nightmare is one of those movies that, you can tell from some of the posters, needs all the deceptive marketing it can get: a title hastily designed and assembled in a Photoshop knockoff (I can say that because I used one to make my banner for this review, and aside from not being able to capture the distortion or shape of the fonts used, I did it fairly quickly), padding the poster with multiple versions of the same characters to make the cast look bigger, a sinister-looking villain with a cheap but creepy mask to invite speculation and curiosity,.... It screams "Full Moon meets The Asylum, but British," and (for this critic, anyway) it doesn't inspire confidence.

In a Cinematic Universe with genetic hybrid animal-men (that made Tigger and Owl work competently well on a budget of literal shoelaces) and a Re-Animator-powered deer monster, Peter Pan's Neverland Nightmare is not the strange, horror-flavored Peter Pan adaptation that an audience with imagination would expect, but a generic, child-abduction torture-porn slasher with characters named Peter, Timmy, Tinkerbell, Tiger Lily, Mary, Wendy, John, and Michael, plus there's a rabid LGBTQ+ character in clown makeup with a hook thrown in there somewhere.

Directed by Scott Chambers (who played Christopher Robin in Blood & Honey II) as the third entry in Rhys Frake-Waterfield's Twisted Childhood Universe (released before Bambi: The Reckoning), Peter Pan's Neverland Nightmare features a child-killer named Peter (Martin Portlock, the voice of Beorcan in Dragon's Dogma II), who is a derivative trope-smoothie of Perkins, The Grabber, the Joker, Pennywise, Mr. Rabbie, and Frank Zito as characters go. Abused by his mother as a child in ways that are thankfully never depicted but can be assumed if you've seen any horror movie ever, Peter uses the original Barrie novel as an escape from his torment, coming to believe he is Peter Pan, and that it is his calling to free children from rules, aging, and adult influences by preparing them to "go to Neverland" (the "special" ones, he brainwashes into disturbing versions of the book characters by subjecting them to the same abuse he suffered and keeping them alive, ironically into adulthood, but just kills the rest and dumps them in the woods). He once used his job as a creepy, Joker-esque circus mime (whom the kids go nuts for anyway because this is a horror movie where people had modern smartphones fifteen years ago and it's trying to homage 70s and 80s abduction horror a little too closely at a point in history where parents should be more aware and protective than they were forty or fifty years ago) to vet his victims, but fifteen years after having his face mutilated by Hook's mother, he kinda can't do that anymore, so he's just a masked, deformed creep with one of the least stealthy vans in horror history, Timmy has grown into a trans woman addicted to "pixie dust" (basically heroin with Neverland branding, so he thinks he's Tinkerbell) whom Peter has brainwashed into a romantic relationship with him (so Peter is a murderer and a pedophile), and James Hook (drag performer Charity Kase, so find me something to eat, and I'll pay you at another time) has grown into the aforementioned rabid amputee clown in Peter's basement.

Enter the Darling family (bringing some continuity to the TCU because Mary Darling, played by Theresa Banham, was Christopher Robin's hypnotherapist in Blood & Honey II, where she was helping him recover memories of his brother's abduction), who will be the modern day victims and protagonists for the remainder of the film. When Michael (Peter DeSouza-Feighoney, The Pope's Exorcist) is captured by Peter because Wendy (Megan Placito) has the attention span of a teenager in a horror movie, she and Tiger Lily (Olumide Olorunfemi, Venom: Let There Be Carnage, whose character here is not named outside of the credits that I can recall) investigate and eventually rescue him with TinkerTimmy's help (and a bit of contrivance and a scene where Peter slaughters a bus full of kids offscreen for the sake of shock value—so it's ineffective—in a movie with a serial killer pedophile and enough gore to support the local butcher shop for the next fiscal year).

The ending suggests that Peter somehow survived having his face brutally impaled again and the box office-to-budget ratio seems to financially justify a proposed sequel where things will get more supernatural (there's a levitation scene in this one that ambiguously hints in that direction), though the credits do not have a "Peter Pan will return" message this time (suggesting that he will not be in the inevitable Poohniverse: Monsters Assemble crossover).

Before I render my verdict (you probably know what it's going to be already), here's another fun but frustrating casting/continuity tidbit: Nicola Wright (who played Mary in Bambi: The Reckoning) had a cameo in Blood & Honey as a reporter. In Blood & Honey II, she played Christopher Robin's mother, Daphne. And in this movie, she is seen as a reporter...who is credited as Daphne! And Timmy's grieving family live in Ashdown! So why isn't Mary Darling (Christopher Robin's hypnotherapist, not to be confused with Mary from Bambi: The Reckoning or Mary Robin from the first Blood & Honey) more responsive here when Michael goes missing? Why isn't she more protective of her family if she lives and works in an area with a history of child abductions and one of her patients has a missing brother (who might have also been abducted by Peter and sold to Wibexr to be experimented on and turned into a bear-manimal with an axolotl healing factor)? Horror movie stupidity? Misunderstood continuity? Does it matter and should I care, even if I kinda do?

I imagine the answers to those rhetorical questions are probably yes, maybe, no, and no. Peter Pan's Neverland Nightmare is as much of a Peter Pan horror movie as this is Hugh Jackman,

with a jankily derivative, creepy-in-all-the-bad-ways villain, a poor understanding of how to execute (in most cases, you can take that as a literal pun) proper shock value, extraneous characters, and an anachronistic plot-salad that's been done to death, Neverland, and beyond in much better films.

D-

Yes, I know I gave Blood & Honey the same score, but that was graded on a curve of ambition, historical cred, and potential, and I would have failed it into the ground otherwise. Peter Pan's Neverland Nightmare gets a pure D-minus as a better-but-not-by-much movie because it has production value and isn't infuriatingly bad, just disappointingly so.

I am halfway through bingeing Apothecary Diaries Season 2 and haven't started the review or put the February calendar together yet, so while I do that, please Stay Tuned and remember to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, leave a comment at the bottom of this post and any others you have opinions about, help out my ad revenue as you read because a delusional sex pest is killing and brainwashing my country one state at a time, and follow me on BlueSky, Tumblr, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest news on my content, like all that's to come in February.

112

Ticketmaster,

Second Star To the Right,

Straight On 'Til Morning,

Out, But Never Landing.