Alice and the Vampire Queen – review

Director: Dan Lantz

Release date: 2023

Contains spoilers

Appearing for free (on the film is now YouTube channel), kind of out of nowhere, it feels churlish to be too critical of this film – especially as it does have some interesting ideas. Unfortunately it also has some really rotten choices as well, most notably in accents.

It has a very loose connection to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, not just in the naming of the titular heroine (Shelby Hightower) but also through actually referencing and quoting Carroll’s novel but, unfortunately, that connection really is missing once one scratches below the surface.

Shelby Hightower as Alice

It starts with a beach and a woman, Madeline (Rachel Aspen), enjoying the location as the sun sets. Figures start appearing around her and she runs up a dune but is grabbed… In a greasy spoon, Alice is preparing a burger. She is openly abused by her boss Big Joe (John Groody, Bloodrunners) and has a highly prominent facial scar (which he references). After being threatened with her parole officer, she walks. Outside, in an alley, a stranger, Charles (Graham Wolfe), offers her a light.

Graham Wolfe as Charles

As they speak it becomes clear that Charles knows a lot about her and, as her backstory fills out, we discover that she was a Michelin star chef who was married to another (abusive) chef. It was he who cut her face and she ended up killing him. Her plea bargain kept the fact that she cut out his liver and served it in his restaurant out of the press. Charles is offering her a deal – cook one meal for his boss, Isabella (Brenna Carnuccio), for a ridiculously large sum of money. If the boss likes it, she’ll be offered a job.

eating steak tartare

Unbeknown to Alice, Isabella and her entourage – Fredrick (Xavier Michael) and Sophia (Danielle Muehlen) – pay Big Joe a visit, expose themselves as vampires and kill him. Alice is asked to make steak tartare, which she does. She is taken to meet Queen Isabella, who is suitably impressed and feeds it to Madelaine and Sophia, revealing the restaurant as a vampire place, where Alice, Charles and kitchen hand Gordon (Chris James Boylan, also Bloodrunners) are the only humans and if Alice doesn’t maintain her usefulness and loyalty, well she’ll be dinner.

Aaron Dalla Villa as Kieran

There is a sub-plot about vampire rebel Kieran (Aaron Dalla Villa) and another where Gordon turns out to be an escaped serial killer (the vampires are aware and are using his peculiar tastes to their advantage). It is notable the Michelin star chef never questions the meat type and apparently vampires like a little undercurrent of rot in consumed meat (though meat laced with garlic or holy water could prove deadly). I liked some of the ideas – such as the queen able to cure Alice’s scar (which she literally finds fallen from her face). The idea of having leverage to maintain control of their human servants worked as a concept. Unfortunately, other things didn’t work so well.

attack

The whole rebellious vampire wanting to usurp the queen was under-explored. The film is a standard 90 minutes, and there is much to be said about not overstaying one’s welcome, but this thread desperately needed more exploration. The serial killer part accelerated from nought-to-sixty way too quickly and more building a relationship to betray it would have been useful – especially as Boylan’s performance was one of the better supporting ones.

restaurant feed 

It is in the performances that we are let down the most. To be fair Shelby Hightower is good as Alice and does what she can with what she has, likewise – despite the comment above – Villa is excellent as Kieran, his performance adding a nuance to a character that the narrative didn’t provide. However, most of the vampires were using the most god awfully fake English accents, with a comment suggesting it was because they felt superior to humans and their (American) accents. These accents stifled performance (this was also true of the one human character who affected an accent), making things stagy at best.

another restaurant feed 

There are good ideas in this and whilst the idea of a human chef amongst vampires is not unique (and my mind drifted to Broil as I watched) there was much that could have been done with this. Director Dan Lantz is no stranger to making a vampire movie, having helmed Bloodrunners. This is not as good as that film partially as interesting things are under-explored and mostly because the accent affectation stifled performance badly, killing nuances that should have been there and impeding the actors’ art. 4 out of 10 reflects the fact that, despite this, I found myself quite taken with the good bits of the film.

The imdb page is here.