Review – Alice
This adaptation/reinvention was aired on the (I shudder to actually type this) SyFy channel. God that is so retarded, SciFi channel, I hope you realize. Definitely not your childhood Alice in Wonderland … which is a good thing for me because I hate Alice in Wonderland. Acid trip if there ever was one. But this reinvention takes all the elements and throws them together in a way that was nicely modern, funny, mildly badass at times, and not nearly as bad as the SciFi movies normally are. (Yes, I have reverted to SciFi, because SyFy is dumb.)
Now, I’m not saying this movie didn’t have some of the campiness you come to expect from SciFi movies, because it definitely did. Lord, in abundance. But I was still pretty entertained. Honestly, I think the reason I loved this movie so much was entirely because of three things: the Queen of Hearts, played by Kathy Bates … wonderful. The White Knight played by Matt Frewer (maybe better know as Jim Taggart on Eureka, you know, the Aussie veterinarian and “biological containment specialist”) … god damn that man was hilarious. His beard alone is almost reason enough to watch this movie. And the final and most wonderful thing in this miniseries – the Mad Hatter. Or just Hatter, as his character’s called in this Wonderland version. Played by Andrew Lee Potts, Hatter is by far the best character. Okay, Alice is cool, and her chemistry with Hatter is awesome, but really, Potts is what carried this movie for me. Why?
Well, let’s see … uh, because, that’s why. Not only is he adorable (man does he know how to pull off that hat) but he’s … well, best way to put it? He’s basically a hot Ricky Gervais. Yeah, take the beyond hilarious comedy style of Ricky Gervais and put it into a sexy body. That, my friends, is Adrew Lee Potts as Hatter. Now if that doesn’t sound like something you’d enjoy for a few hours, stop reading my blog. Seriously, you’re time would be much better spent reading this.
But besides the wonderful Hatter, here’s a few other things that were both campy and fantastic in this new Alice tale: a karate-chopping Alice with a black belt; a casino that supposedly sucks emotions like “joy” and “anger” and “innocence” but in reality just makes all the players inside look like they’ve just had an orgasm; about ten seconds of Tim Curry; flying flamingo mopeds; an army of skeletons fighting an empire that is way too dumb to actually function; the required Scifi green screen monster – in this case, the Jabberwocky; oh, and an assassin with a cookie jar for a head.
Now if that doesn’t entice you, I don’t know what will. (Actually, I do.)
