It was laying on the ground, it had cover art that went beyond the confines of horrendous, as you watched it you heard voices, then some creepy shit, and that boy would grow up to be Saberspark.
Okay I'm just bullshitting. That was a half-assed summary of an old creepypasta based on Alice in Wonderland. Ah, but which one? The 2010 one. Ah, you mean the live-action Disney movie? Well keep that in mind.
I remember surfing IMDb when I was in jr. high, frequently checking out the bottom 100 and finding this film. I had no way of checking it out, so a lot was left to the imagination. It wouldn't be until years later that I discovered how bad most movies I caught on the bottom 100 were.
Background
This movie is an enigma. It was the only production by Cinematronics, no relation to the game company behind Dragon's Lair, but I'd give it the benefit of the doubt this was always intended to be a one-time affair. The film was helmed by one Michael Conroy. You'd think he'd be a mystery too, but it turns out he's been active as late as 2020, if IMDb's anything to go by.
He had also directed two low budget horror movies, both of which feature Michael Anthony Coppola, I swear they're multiplying, as well as having involvement in some ice fishing TV series.
This came out in 2010, yes, the same year as Disney's live-action take. Somehow, some way, Conroy acquired an archive of a radio show based on Lewis Carroll's tale, broadcast on NBC. Since Disney's take was gonna be out soon, he figured he could cash in with as little effort as possible. So, presumably on his own, he drew a whole bunch of stills, got enough JPEGs to make High Guardian Spice blush, and made sure to sync it up to the radio show, then saw to it to get this on store shelves around the time Disney hit that scene.
So yeah, this is essentially a low-effort mockbuster to cash in on the Disney adaptation that came out that year, with as little effort as possible. Mystery solved.
The film was distributed by Music Video Distributors, a name so generic it's hard to track down the actual company. But if I had to guess, I'd say they're a budget distributor that reissued old films on BluRay.
The presenter of this, Jeffrey H. Aikman, had involvement in horror and potentially pornographic films, also documentaries. He and Conroy would work together on a Sam Barber documentary. Jacob Farrell served as a background designer, or so it seems, but has also worked with Conroy on his two horror films, and we owe the character design to Lorene Zammuto, once more also only involved in Conroy's two horror flicks.
In spite of this movie being easy pickings, nobody has bothered to talk about this, I mean maybe MrEnter talked about this at some point. It's easy pickings, but otherwise ignored by a community that relies on easy pickings.
Unfortunately, it's gonna be hard to talk about this. I can't be too hard on a radio play that had standards well beneath what we have now. What is this MST3K? So this won't be a traditional review, sorry to say.
Animation a Bit
As they're essentially animating over radio audio, there's gonna be issues. Since radio isn't a visual medium, the dialog is stretched in order to help viewers get immersed in the narrative. Because of this, scenes are animated quite literally to match the dialog, making things seem slow and awkward at best, and unintentionally creepy at worst.
Yeah, the drag is undeniable, as if someone didn't think through the difference between audio and visual entertainment.
But let's get the white rabbit out of the room, the art direction... yikes. No surprise this was someone's first art project, either they tried so hard to capture the whimsy of children's art, or just felt bad for Chris Chan and wanted to make something that looked worse than Sonichu. There's no nuance, it doesn't fit with the nature of the story, it really looks as though they needed to make something and fast to cash in on another movie, oh wait.
So I Yield
There isn't really that much that could be said about this, maybe that's why people have been sitting on this for so long. Was this worth it? Well I had the sense to figure out why this came to be. It seems money is the definitive answer for many equations, that was this. Probably cost around a few hundred bucks, lest all the money was put toward acquiring the audio.
Wanna see for yourself? Let's see how far you can go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=we07mAJRxdE&t=610s
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