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Let’s Get Real Personal With the Enemies of Alice: Madness Returns
Come June we’ll finally get another taste of the sweet, sweet nectar that is the wonderfully depraved Alice: Madness Returns. From what we’ve seen of the game so far it’s looking rather fantastic. If you’re still not sold on the game’s unique take on the classic Alice in Wonderland tale, these in-depth looks at two of the game’s main baddies, the Executioner and the Card Guards, might help win you over a bit.
After the jump we have some screenshots, concept art and character profiles for two of the game’s antagonists. The Executioner is aptly named as he lumbers over the battlefield armed with an incredibly intimidating scythe, and for some reason I’m finding the Card Guards oddly adorable. Head past the break so we can get intimate with these baddies.
Without weapons, the Queen’s reckless guards aren’t much more than “fodder,” in a fight. They were never really good with their hands; but this current bout of clawing demands caution. There are so many of them! And they’re eager to give up their lives. Even dead, their corpora delecti and remnants can cause a problem.
These guys are the grunts of the Queen’s army, they’ll come at you in waves, relentlessly chipping away at your health until you just can’t take any more. They don’t care about themselves as their sole purpose is to take your ass down.
Similar to their armor-less bretheren, these Card Guards should never be underestimated. They’re just as relentless as their weaker siblings but they can actually hold their own in battle.
The wicked staff they carry makes them dangerous, but ponderous. Still, were their weapon to hit its target, they wouldn’t need speed to deliver the coup de grace.
With less intelligence and imagination than a wind-up toy, this brute does the bidding of the Queen. Her creature, its orders out of date, is certain to fall hard—when he falls. But until then, he’s so much more than a heartache.
The Executioner isn’t one to be trifled with. He’s mean, dumb and stronger than ten retarded chimpanzees (and that’s equal to roughly one superhero). Plus, he’s armed with a scythe, which is arguably the scariest melee weapon out there with the possible exception of a pillow sack filled with small mammals.
Alice: Madness Returns releases on June 14th for the Xbox 360, PS3 and PC.
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Let’s start with the good news. Lockbox looks far better than its misleading marketing materials suggest, a supernatural horror movie so darkly lit and color graded that you’ll have to squint your way through jump scares. It’s also anchored by reliable genre performers. That’s also about where the good news ends with this rote adaptation of Knifepoint Horror Podcast story “Winthrop.”
The empathetic Carla Gugino gives her all as Ellen, a saint of a woman with boundless patience who takes on life’s hard luck with a kind smile. After giving up her career as a fashion designer to become caretaker for a dying mother, she’s then forced to reinvent herself once more when her caretaker role ends. That catches us up to the events of Lockbox, where Ellen is asked to take in a cousin she hasn’t seen in quite some time who’s dealing with severe PTSD.
Just as Ellen finally establishes a real connection with Winthrop (Lou Taylor Pucci), it’s interrupted by the arrival of peculiar neighbor Vahna (Katharine Isabelle), who spells clear trouble. When Vahna shows up dead, it sets in motion a supernatural battle of possession.
Image Credit: Aura entertainment
Director Daniel Stamm (The Last Exorcism, Prey for the Devil) and screenwriter Justin Yoffe approach Lockbox in the broadest of brushstrokes, dooming it from the start with clunky storytelling and woefully underdeveloped themes of heady topics like PTSD. Winthrop is a character that comes loaded with emotional baggage and trauma that’s piled on throughout his tragic life, but much like its title, his interiority and history are treated like a tightly guarded secret meant to prolong the supernatural mystery.
The problem here, though, is that Lockbox is too sparse to sustain mystery at all, and it instead robs Winthrop of characterization. It winds up trapping the talented Pucci without anywhere to go, toggling between wounded animal and mentally disoriented.
From there, Lockbox bounds through plot developments without any sense of stakes or purpose, peppered by a smattering of haphazard paint-by-numbers jump scares. The only unwavering constant is Ellen’s resolute faith, and Stamm seems to leave it entirely to Gugino to guide confused audiences through this inconsequential story right up until its supernatural climax.
Image Credit: Aura entertainment
To give more credit, Lockbox at least injects an unconventional exorcism here; just don’t expect much in the way of explanation. When the film finally reveals the meaning behind its title, it dangles a fascinating carrot it has zero interest in delivering. More than a severe lack of fleshing out its characters beyond plot drivers or devices, this faith-based flick also seems terrified to offer any worldbuilding whatsoever.
Yoffe’s script stretches the short story beyond its means instead of fleshing it out, and Stamm fills out the gaps with cheap CGI scares and overwrought performances; Isabelle’s Vahna is beyond cartoonish in her villainy. It’s also pretty nonsensical, treating only Ellen’s faith with the utmost sincerity and largely squandering its typically reliable talent. So much so that the final imagery, pure sunkissed saccharine sentimentality, leaves you with the feeling that this horror movie might be better suited as an entry in Chicken Soup for the Soul.
Lockbox releases in select theaters on July 3, 2026.
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