Director/Screenplay – Scott Chambers, Producers – Scott Chambers & Rhys Frake-Waterfield, Photography – Vince Knight, Music – Greg Birkunshaw, Visual Effects – Luma Pix Creative Studios LLP, Prosthetics Designer – Paula Anne Booker-Harrison & Shaune Harrison, Production Design – Bridget Milesi. Production Company – Jagged Edge Productions.
Cast
Megan Placito (Wendy Darling), Martin Portlock (Peter Pan), Peter De Souza-Feighoney (Michael Darling), Kit Green (Tinkerbell), Teresa Banham (Mary Darling), Olumide Olorunfemi (Tiger Lily), Hardy Yusuf (Joey), Campbell Wallace (John Darling), Nicholas Woodeson (Steven), Charity Kase (Hook), Lucas Allermann (Young James)
Plot
Wendy Darling goes to pick up her younger brother Michael from school. However, as she is distracted by the appearance of her ex, Michael is abducted in a van. Michael’s abductor is Peter Pan, a disfigured man who says that he is going to take Michael to Neverland. Living with Peter is the former abductee known as Tinker Bell, who wants to be a fairy. Both Peter and Tinker Bell are addicted to a drug that they call fairy dust. As Wendy searches for Michael, Peter slaughters an entire bus of schoolchildren searching for Michael’s friend Joey.
Scott Chambers, often billed as Scott Jeffrey but also known under a host of pseudonyms, is a prolific British producer and frequently director. He has produced over a hundred films since 2017 – that’s averaging around twelve a year. Quite a sensation was created with the Chambers’ produced Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey (2023), his greatest success to date, where Chambers and associates took a beloved children’s character that had just entered public domain and delivered a brutal and nasty horror version. The film was a surprising success and has seen Chambers and associates making a host of other horror versions of children’s stories and fairytales with the likes of Mary Had a Little Lamb (2023), Three Blind Mice (2023) and Cinderella’s Curse (2024). Unlike the other imitators that have rushed in to join the bandwagon, Chambers/Jeffrey and associates have been producing horror films based on children’s story/fairytale characters for some time before this – they have an ongoing Tooth Fairy, Humpty Dumpty, Jack Frost and Jack and Jill series, which are all onto multiple sequels by now.
Peter Pan (1904) is the famous play from J.M. Barrie about the eternal boy who won’t grow up. There have been multiple film versions of the story ranging from the Disney animated Peter Pan (1953) to the live-action likes of Peter Pan (2003) and Peter Pan and Wendy (2023). And that’s not counting sequels like Steven Spielberg’s Hook (1991), the live-action prequel Pan (2015) and oddities like Neverland (2011), which offered a science-fiction rationale.
Scott Chambers goes incredibly dark when it comes to Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare – a great deal more so than the Winnie-the-Pooh films. Rather than an eternal child living in the fantasy realm of Neverland with the Lost Boys, Peter is a child abductor and killer who promises to send the children he snatches to Neverland ie. killing them. Wendy is now an adult and rather than journey to Neverland with the children spends the film searching for her brother after he is snatched. Peter is an ugly disfigured figure – at one point we get a nude shot of him where it appears (it is not entirely clear) that he is missing his genitalia.
Martin Portlock as a less-than-innocent Peter Pan
There’s a Tinker Bell who is played by trans actor Kit Green, another wasted soul and grown-up lost child who dreams of being a fairy while shooting up through a needle that has Fairy Dust on the label. We even meet an equivalent of Captain Hook, another abductee kept a prisoner in the cellar, his arm replaced with a hook after it was hacked off by Peter during the prologue. I was kind of wanting to see what they were going to do with the crocodile and the ticking clock but that does not appear.
In the opening scenes, we see a child (the young Hook) being abducted and Chambers gives us a nauseatingly graphic scene where we see his mother being scalped. Later we see, a bus driver being stabbed up through the chin up into the mouth. J.M. Barrie would be spinning in his grave enough to bore a hole through the centre of the Earth about the point that we get to scenes of Peter Pan slaughtering a busload of children. Later, we see Peter kill Tinker Bell by cutting off her arms and then crushing her head with his foot. You also cannot deny that Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare is quite a well-made film. I quite liked it.
Scott Chambers’ other films as director are The Bad Nun (2018), ClownDoll (2019), Bad Nun: Deadly Vows (2019), The Final Scream (2019), Cupid (2020), Don’t Speak (2020), HellKat (2021), Bats (2021), Lockdowners (2021), Conjuring the Genie (2021), Cannibal Troll (2021), Dragon Fury (2021), Hatched (2021), The Mutation (2021), Curse of Humpty Dumpty (2021), Spider in the Attic (2021), The Gardener (2021), Exorcist: Vengeance (2022), Kingdom of the Dinosaurs (2023) and Firenado (2023).
