Starring Johnny Depp, Mia Wasikowska, and Helena Bonham Carter. Rated PG. Opens Friday, March 5

So Alice in Wonderland isn’t exactly your “just say no” movie. Like, there’s the hookah-smoking caterpillar—hence the PG rating, because that ain’t clove in that trippy-talking blue larva’s pipe.

And even though this Alice is now 19, she’s still prone to popping unknown substances just because they say “eat me” and “drink me”. And you know what happened the last time you did that. Exactly. So if you’re thinking you’ll need “some kind of mushroom”—as Grace Slick sang—to fully absorb the Tim Burton treatment of Lewis Carroll’s already twisted Victorian tale, word up: leave your magic fungi in your sock drawer. The hallucinogens are on the screen, man. Wait—paranoid thought—what if they’re embedded in those 3-D glasses?

No surprise from the maestro of Edward Scissorhands and The Nightmare Before Christmas , Burton’s CGI Wonderland is a mad mashup of fantastic head trip and gothic dreamscape, sometimes strangely blurry at its 3-D edges. And when Alice (dryly witty Mia Wasikowska) plummets down that bunny hole whilst dodging a marriage proposal, the wackjobs she encounters are as perversely entertaining as Carroll’s originals.

Besides Burton favourites Johnny Depp, in emerald contacts and flaming Bozo hairdo as a tragicomic Mad Hatter, and Helena Bonham Carter as the lethally bratty, big-noggined Red Queen, fellow nutters supply hallucinogenic humour too. Weirdo Crispin Glover plays the Knave of Hearts; smoothie Alan Rickman, the druggie-wise caterpillar; Stephen Fry, an electric-turquoise-striped Cheshire Cat; Matt Lucas, bizarrely endearing Tweedledee and Tweedledum; and Anne Hathaway, the flakey White Queen.

Because plot wasn’t exactly Carroll’s thing, screenwriter Linda Woolverton ( The Lion King ) gives Alice a mission and suddenly it’s more slightly uneasy action flick than pure Burtonesque bonkers. Darn, because as folks in this film say, “All the best people are mad, you know.” And often the mad ones make the best films.