It makes sense that someone would make a surreal horror movie out of ALICE'S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND because that book is surreal and horrific. Yeah, yeah, I know it's for kids and alternative types are supposed to think it's super deep and all that bullshit but come on. There's a Queen who chops off everyone's heads and a baby that turns into a pig. Horrific.Anyway, this version of ALICE is part live action, part stop motion animation, and comes to us from Czechoslovakia. It stars Kristyna Kohoutova as Alice and tells the familiar story mostly through images. Alice narrates the film and recounts any necessary dialog, as if she's reading it out of a book. This gets a little repetitive, as we cut to a close up of Alice's mouth saying "X character said," every time someone talks, but the repetitive nature of the movie is one of the things that makes it surreal and horrific.
The other thing is that instead of taking place in a wide open country where Alice travels from place to place through forests and paths, etc, this movie takes place almost all within the confines of a dark, dirty, abandoned house. Alice travels from one foreboding room to the other, each room containing some characters or a scene from the book, as interpreted through the creepy lens of this weird stop motion animation.
You'll recognize lots of stuff from the famous story, but it's all a little skewed and even weirder than its source material. On top of the voice over and creepy atmosphere, there's also a lot of very creaky sound design. Almost every sound effect has been recorded after the fact, and they're comprised of all kinds of scratches and scrapes. It's like listening to someone play a recording of nails on a chalk board.
This isn't a horror movie in the traditional sense and has more than its fair share of commenters on IMDB asking why people think it is so scary. It's not really scary so much as it's just weird and unexplained. The images and sounds will stick with you after seeing a movie like this. That's not such a big deal if you're an old man like me but if I had come across this when I was 8 you can bet I would have been disturbed by it.
It's also kinda funny, though.
Kudos to your review. I saw this movie several years ago and it opened me up to Jan Švankmajer's great surreal and often strangely funny claymation shorts that are very worth watching if you haven't ever seen them. If you're into surreal creepiness watch "La planète sauvage" by René Laloux. It possesses a lot of the same lovely, vintage weirdness.
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