Alice in Terrorland, Rula Lenska as The Red Queen

Rula Lenska!  The Alberto VO-5 babe from the 1970s!  Remember her gravelly voice when she extolled, "I'm Rula Lenska!"  The proclamation left no doubt that she was indeed Rula Lenska...and you were not. Also in the 1970s this icon did her magnum opus, "Queen Kong." Who ever thought she'd be in a 2023 horror film that scored a 2.3/10 rating on IMDB?  Looking and sounding much like Robert Morley, she turns in a less dramatic performance than her portrayal of a feminist explorer in the aforementioned gorilla classic. Today we look at "Alice in Terrorland," directed by Richard John Taylor.

Alice (Lizzy Willis), a nubile teen survives a house fire that kills her parents. After great effort, social services finds her "grandmother." Now Alice is sent to live with Beth (Lenska), her grandmother at a mansion called...Wonderland. The dark dreary place holds family secrets. You will figure out the big ones, like the redheaded grandmother is actually The Red Queen. Beth poisons Alice's tea to make her sick and hallucinatory.  As Beth reads her Alice in Wonderland, Alice nods off and goes on psychedelic trips in which she meets the characters in the Lewis Carroll classic. First, she'll meet the rabbit (Steve Wraith).  By the way, all the characters she meets are either serial killers, torturers, or perverts. It should be noted that many critics believe Lewis Carroll was of that ilk.

As Beth keeps feeding Alice poisoned tea, the characters she meets get more hideous.  She'll meet the walrus (Rikki Kimpton) who abducts children and puts them through a meat grinder before eating them. Eventually Alice gets enough clues about The Red Queen to realize her grandmother is her. Now, trying to put clues together from malicious characters who seek to disembowel and murder her, Alice must mount a strategy to fend off the Red Queen and emerge from Wonderland whole and with sanity.

Will Alice escape the clutches of The Red Queen? Hey, wasn't this the plot of "Resident Evil," too? Will Rula Lenska's friends from America still visit her in the crumbling old mansion? Just how loyal is this film to the real persona of Lewis Carroll? Take a ride into 1970s nostalgia and meet up with the Alberto VO-5 babe, Rula Lenska, and see "Alice in Terrorland."