SyFy, in its long tradition of excellent decisions, tackled another new take on a classic fantasy. It’s had a spotty history with that; Tin Man gave me hives, Alice had 99 problems but came out on the fondly-cheesy side of awful.

With Neverland, they re-imagined the origins of Peter Pan: how he discovered Neverland, his history with Hook, and how everything came to be just before Wendy Moira Angela Darling and siblings stopped by.

It…was.

I find I always have a little trouble with workmanlike things; the effects were cheesy but not painful, the performances that succeeded did so despite the dialogue, and the plot was like a resolute game of duck-duck-goose dutifully touching on elements of canon in turn. (And then they made Charles Dance talk very seriously about the magical spheres that harness astral energy to bring you to Neverland, because SyFy is super huge on the tangible portals to its fantasy worlds.)

Having devoted four hours of my life to this miniseries, I feel obliged to review it somehow, but this picture of Peter, frozen by magic, pretty much sums up my feelings:

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A camp movie walks a thin line.

If you’re going to go for camp deliberately, you have to make sure of a lot of things. For instance, every actor in your film has to have gotten the same memo. Your script has to make sure to avoid sudden pockets of maudlin sentimentality, while still having enough serious lines for your actors to over-deliver. You have to have enough going on that there’s always something in the frame to enjoy. You have to be able to manufacture the sense that it’s all happening spontaneously, while trying to convey your tongue-in-cheek intentions and/or extremely serious camp-situation intentions. And ideally, you’d do all this while sneaking some homoerotic subtext in at intervals. Basically, there’s a reason most great camp is accidental.

And if you tried really hard to manufacture some camp, and someone told you, “We also need steampunk because that’s getting popular,” and you said yes, and someone else told you, “Also we need a lot of Mission Impossible action to make sure everything is exciting,” and you said yes, and someone was like, “Is Mads Mikkelsen available to humiliate himself for two months?” and you said yes, and someone else was like, “Orlando Bloom would probably be strangely perfect for this, right?”, and you said yes, and you decided you were going to make this movie as No Homo as you possibly fucking could, you would be Andrew Davies, and you would have written The Three Musketeers.

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Because sometimes amazing things happen, ComingSoon.net put up the first five minutes of The Three Musketeers. (Thanks to eagle-eyed cleolinda, who discovers all things.)

I’m calling it now: Comedy of the year. It and Jonah Hex will have to duke it out for best of the decade.

This is one of those bad movies that delights in its awfulness; the sort of movie where Matthew Macfayden got to fill out a little bubble-sheet.

Check Which Things You Wish Written in to Your Character:

- Rising slowly from water in a Venetian mask
- Using collapsible multi-shot crossbows
- Killing half a dozen guards even though we learn ten seconds later that he didn’t even need to bother
X Be the most chiseled Musketeer
- Cheesy dialogue only
- Kissing Milla Jovovich
X Wearing period-accurate lace collar
X Use bouncing wall-bits and chains and stuff like it’s heavy. (We don’t know about this part yet, we’re hoping Ray will say yes, feel free to X this one out, we’ll take care of it.)
- Deliver all the exposition

Then, in the Special Notes section, he added:
- I’d rather not do all the bending down to unlock the secret passage, my knees are acting up.

I’m seeing this tomorrow, which seems like ages to wait, but I suspect it’s one of those movies so wonderfully dreadful that, after I see it, I will feel as though it’s always been in my life.

I have spoken many times about the messed-up movies that helped define my childhood. The Red Shoes might be the primary offender in this case, but The Last Unicorn, The Linguini Incident, and The Flight of Dragons also feature heavily.

However, there are several formative movie experiences that I missed the first time, when you’re in that golden age of understanding that makes you the primary target for that particular piece of cinema entertainment. Labyrinth, for example, I didn’t see until high school, too late for me to wholeheartedly embrace the Henson-ness, and WAY too late for me to not snicker at the relentless sexual-initiation subtext of pitting Jennifer Connelly against the Thin Tights Duke, a dynamic that jump-started puberty for so many others.

Another one of these gems I seem to have missed is Rigoletto, a jewel in the crown of the Feature Films for the Family series.

(Actual tag line on that video box cover: “A musical fantasy ringing of truth and filled with mystery and love.” Just…keep that in mind.)

It has nothing to do with the opera Rigoletto. In theory this is good, since Rigoletto is kind of odd. (There’s a Duke who wants to bang everyone, and his jester Rigoletto, who gets cursed by some gent and who keeps his daughter locked up in the house except to go to church, and of course the Duke saw a hot virgin at church and wishes to sex her, and sends nobles to find her, but they follow Rigoletto and when they see his daughter they think he has a mistress, so they blindfold Rigoletto and make him participate in the kidnapping of his own daughter, and she gets to the Duke’s and is like, “Oh, you’re that guy staring creepily at me all through church!” and he’s like “Nice shoes, shall we bang?” and Rigoletto shows up and is like, “I am going to kill that Duke, I am so mad, okay, you dress as a boy and get out of town and I’ll hire an assassin,” and she dresses as a boy but comes back to warn the Duke as the Duke is pleading for his life with his new girlfriend in the room (awkward), but the daughter is still like, “I’ll sacrifice myself for the Duke I love!” and then the assassin drags a corpse in a bag over to Rigoletto and Rigoletto is like “YESSS ALL RIGHT let me look inside OH MY GOD IT’S MY KID OH GAH THE CURSE” the end.)

However, this movie’s plot is even weirder.

And frankly, could have used an assassin.
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A week or so ago, I talked about my latest Intertitles column, which makes passing mention of The Scarlet Letter as all that is frightening and uproarious about literary adaptations.

In some ways, knowing that the film is “Freely Adapted from the Novel” should tell you what sort of movie you’re in for, but at the same time, it sort of sounds like an adaptation in which Hester Prynne has enough of this Puritan nonsense and peaces out on a dragon to go live in the mountains and do just whatever the hell she wants. Honestly, that would be a lot more fun than the adaptation we get, which is a total blowhard movie that feels like a community theatre rewriting of The Crucible, and some bonus racism.

Oddly, this Scarlet Letter is also in dialogue with its source material, in that it wants to put an overtly feminist spin on the text, enhancing the idea of Hester’s suffering as an extension of Puritanical misogyny and changing some of the text’s original elements to politicize the supernatural (here Mistress Hibbins is no witch, just an Earth Mother madam who gets on the wrong side of a pissed-off governing body). In theory, that could all have worked out just fine, except that then someone started writing it, and it turned into the kind of movie that has this poster, and it just all goes downhill from there.

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