The movie opens with a teenage¹ girl, Alice, sitting by the side of the road in modern-day Britain. (Maybe in greater London, based on the aerial shot.) We can guess a thing or two about her personality, because she’s writing some dreamy, whimsical poetry in a journal.

The scene serves no other purpose other than to fill time, which actually makes it an excellent intro for this movie, in which not much happens and there’s a lot of padding. Some of the slo-mo and scenery shots would have been evocative in moderation, but after a while they only evoked a temptation to skip ahead, which I didn’t always resist.

This is the movie’s biggest flaw – it’s under 80 minutes, but its actual content could probably have fit in a half-hour Twilight Zone episode.

Cut to a big, overgrown old country house and Alice meeting her grandmother, who exposits all about Alice’s parents having died in a house fire and how great it is that the two of them will be living together in this grand old house called… wait for it… Wonderland.²

Soon afterward, Alice gets sick and starts hallucinating Lewis Carroll characters – well, as close to those characters as the film’s budget will allow, anyway, which isn’t very.

Without spoiling too much, the characters are Alice’s subconscious trying to tell her something, and that and the “orphaned by a house fire” bit are the only similarities to American McGee’s Alice, no matter what that lying bastardly cover art might have tried to suggest.

What else? Oh, the movie’s indoor scenes are very, very sparsely lit. I don’t often have trouble with that, but I had some here. Some shots might as well have been the outline of a head on a black background.

And certain characters spoke slowly enough to make me resentfully wonder if it wasn’t another form of padding.

Speaking of more padding, the movie eventually ends with another scene of poetry journaling… and yes, I just wrote that a 77-minute movie “eventually” ends, which should tell you exactly how much I got out of it.

If someone came to me asking for horror-adjacent Carrollesque media recommendations, I would point them to a let’s play of either of American McGee’s Alice games over this. I’d even recommend the Tim Burton Alice movies over this – I haven’t rewatched them in years and haven’t even considered it until just now, and they aren’t horror-adjacent unless you overthink them really hard, but at least they have a little spectacle and energy.

Unless you’re an aspiring filmmaker looking for many, many examples of creepy tracking shots, Alice in Terrorland is not for you. If you’re morbidly curious, though, it’s currently free on YouTube Premium

1. I’m guessing she’s a teenager, because she’s sent to live with a relative. I don’t remember her age ever being specified, and the actress is a twenty-something graduate of an adult performing-arts school.
2. I’m pretty sure that Alice is a lot more popular as a girl’s name than “Wonderland” is as a place name, although a couple of quick searches turned up a number of examples.