Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare Review – Still Has Some Growing Up To Do

Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare is a slightly frustrating film. It’s relatively engaging, especially given its current universe mates, but its premise still taints all the fun. If you have endless patience for the Twisted Childhood Universe’s edgy sensibilities, you’ll have fun with its latest entry. You’ll also probably love it if you haven’t watched any other horror movies from the last decade or so.

Writer/director Scott Chambers has extensive experience in the Twisted Childhood Universe, or Poohniverse, as some call it. He produced Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey, earning a Razzie for his troubles. Chambers loved that experience enough to star as Christopher Robin in the sequel. Outside of the franchise, he appears in films like Netflix’s Malevolent and Hammer’s Doctor Jekyll.

Never Go to Neverland

Like the rest of the Twisted Childhood Universe, Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare is a grim reimagining of a kids’ story. J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan; or, the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up follows a mischievous flying boy with a small army of orphaned kids. Naturally, the edgy take on that material is about a serial child killer. In Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey, the actual Pooh Bear and friends killed their victims. This one is much more like a familiar serial killer thriller, but its murderer takes inspiration from the source material. If their Peter Pan is Michael Myers, the next obvious step is casting Wendy Darling as Laurie Strode. When the killer kidnaps Wendy’s little brother, she’ll have to brave his nightmarish den to save the poor boy from Neverland. The premise is obvious and straightforward, but the execution is a semistructured hodgepodge of familiar tropes.

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If you know anything about Rhys Frake-Waterfield’s Twisted Childhood Universe, you know it’s heavy with horror homage. Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey was as generic as slashers come, but the second film studied the genre. Its cast of villains covered the primary spectrum of 70s and 80s horror icons. If Pooh 2 was an 80s marathon, Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare is doing today’s top 40. The film borrows roughly half of its contents from Scott Derickson’s The Black Phone. What it doesn’t take from that modern hit comes from Joker, Terrifier, The Silence of the Lambs, or Stephen King’s It. While there are one or two fond callbacks to classics, most of this film feels like a supercut of the last decade in horror. While it’s certainly copying the best, these movies will only escape comparisons to The Asylum when they come up with their own identity.

Panning Peter

A slasher is only as good as its villain, and the titular Peter Pan is only alright. Like the movie he’s in, Peter is a bundle of familiar tropes that sometimes blend together. In his first couple of scenes, he’s Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker playing Pennywise the Clown. He suffers a nasty facial laceration early on, robbing him of his initial appearance in favor of something grosser. He bears this lengthy scar for most of the film, often donning a very dull human face mask to cover it up. I kept thinking he looked a bit like Michael Myers from Rob Zombie’s Halloween II, but I’ve also heard comparisons to a D-list Noel Fielding character. He looks okay in motion, but the more I look at his scar in stills, the more it looks like paper mache.

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As a character, Peter Pan is not exceptionally deep. We learn his motivations over the course of the story, but they barely register in the mix of plot elements. You could guess his gimmick from the premise. He has issues with his mother, an obsession with little kids, and some dreamlike hallucinations of his mythical Neverland. He’s also a hardcore drug addict who keeps a fellow junkie on board as his Tinkerbell. I’d compare him most immediately to Nicolas Cage’s Longlegs from the Oz Perkins film of the same name, but Peter wouldn’t survive the side-by-side. Actor Martin Portlock is stellar in the role. His voice flits between several modes, each of which fits perfectly. If only the script gave him more to do, he’d reach a genuine upper echelon in the genre. I look forward to him getting better roles.

Now That’s Twisted

Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare has several selling points. The imagery is often suitably creepy, the jump scares work, and the practical gore effects absolutely do the trick. It’s a thousand times scarier than the previous films in its franchise, but that’s a low bar. It may be among the scariest recent films with such a low budget. Unfortunately, all of its positive qualities struggle to shine past the premise. You can’t go more than a few minutes without someone reminding you that the draw here is supposed to be a dark, edgy version of Peter Pan. You can just feel a middle school student gushing about the movie where Peter Pan kills kids to his classmates. Personally, I have limited tolerance for that kind of “Can you believe we’re doing this?” stunt media. I thought Blood and Honey represented the death of irony, but they’re happy to kick its corpse.

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I like parts of Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare, but most of them came from better movies. This whole Pooniverse experiment still feels like a cheap gimmick that treads a grim line between punk rock and corporate crap. People were so excited to see someone stick it to Disney by turning one of their big sellers into a killer. The second they saw Blood and Honey, the conversation shifted as humanity saw another bad attempt to milk a beloved character for profit. Now, finally, it feels like there’s a tiny bit of soul behind this franchise, but it’s still struggling to survive. You’ll have some fun with Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare, but this franchise still has a lot of growing up to do.