Spoiler Alert: Spoilers follow for Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare
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The Twisted Childhood Universe is only continuing to grow. Following on the heels of Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey and its sequel, the boy who won’t grow up is now the latest victim in an ongoing quest to traumatize everyone’s beloved childhood memories. This week sees the limited run of Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare, which may be the darkest installment in the TCU to date and arguably the goriest.
While the Blood and Honey films openly embraced the aesthetic of ‘80s slashers like Friday the 13th, Neverland Nightmare draws clear inspiration from modern hits like The Black Phone, It, and the grimy, unpleasant aesthetic of Eli Roth’s body of work. As such, in a tonal departure for the franchise, it’s unabashedly nasty and mean-spirited in its violence. Yet the most graphic scene of all, right in the middle of the climax, might have gone too far.
Tinker Bell Deserved Better in ‘Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare’
Neverland Nightmare reimagines J.M. Barrie’s most famous hero as a drug-addicted child abductor. The film’s plot kicks into gear when a physically scarred Peter Pan abducts the now-adolescent Michael Darling, forcing his sister Wendy to come to his rescue. Scenes depicting Michael in captivity illustrate Peter’s newfound monstrousness; while promising to take the children to “Neverland,” it’s clear that he intends to kill them. Some of his victims, most notably Captain Hook, remain alive but imprisoned in his basement to suffer.
But the cruelest fate of all is undoubtedly that of Tinker Bell, here reimagined as a transgender woman kidnapped by Peter years before the events of the film. To maintain her loyalty, he’s gotten her hooked on heroin, or at least a strain of the drug that he’s dubbed “pixie dust.” As the movie reaches its climax, and Wendy and Michael try to escape the hideout, it becomes clear that Tinker Bell is only now learning of Peter’s murderous intentions and thus feels conflicted over her complicity.
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When she finally confronts Peter over this, it leads to the goriest sequence in Neverland Nightmare. A vengeful Peter slowly breaks both of Tinker Bell’s arms over a table, and after leaving her on the ground to writhe in pain, he chops off both of those limbs with a machete. Worse still, when she’s seen to be alive only a few minutes later, Peter gleefully crushes her skull beneath his boot, finally putting her out of her misery.
To be fair, the practical gore effects in this sequence are very impressive and undeniably leagues above the Blood and Honey films on a technical level. Yet this sequence also feels needlessly cruel, first and foremost in how it fetishizes violence against a transgender woman. But Tinker Bell’s death is also drawn out far too long, to the point where the intended grotesqueness becomes numbing, especially when we’ve barely explored her interiority as a character or what her turn against Peter means to her emotionally. And especially because the film rejects a tongue-in-cheek approach in favor of a relentlessly nasty atmosphere, it’s simply too much to take.
‘Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare,’ Why So Serious?
But all of this speaks to the film’s bigger problem, which is that its tone feels completely wrong. It’s become a recurring problem throughout the Twisted Childhood Universe’s installments; arguably, the biggest selling point for all of these films is the novelty of seeing our favorite childhood icons reimagined as slasher villains. And yet they always play their premises too straight, almost as if they’re too scared to fully commit to the setup’s inherent ridiculousness.
Consider how Neverland Nightmare commits a virtually identical sin to the first Blood and Honey. Outside the names of a few recognizable characters and worldbuilding elements, it has almost nothing to do with the actual source material. The killer in this film could be hypothetically swapped with the Grabber from The Black Phone or Pennywise, and the effect would be exactly the same. If anything, it’s a disappointing regression for the TCU, after Blood and Honey II admittedly tried a bit harder to be tongue-in-cheek and actually have fun with its premise. At the end of the day, it feels like nothing more than a generic slasher with a recognizable IP lazily slapped on just to make a quick buck.
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Yet the depravity feels especially out of place in Neverland Nightmare, and in particular, Tinker Bell’s murder seems to have no purpose other than being a cheap way to get a shock from the audience. Especially since the scene engages with inescapably loaded subject matter just to emphasize the brutality of a kill scene, it’s hard not to escape the feeling that Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare would’ve done good to lighten up. For a film with such a schlocky premise, an ultra-grim and nihilistic tone feels like a fundamentally misguided approach to begin with, especially when it’s this hard to take.
Make no mistake: we want the Twisted Childhood Universe to find its footing (and maybe Pinocchio: Unstrung will live up to the hype the crew has been building for it). But especially since it’s demonstrably worked in their favor in the past, they’d do well to understand what their audience really wants to see — something fun. Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare is playing in theaters from January 13-15.
This story originally appeared on Movieweb
