Pinocchio: Unstrung

It’s hard to know which star you’d have been wishing on for this puppeteered horror riff on Carlo Collodi’s childhood fable to be the answer to your dreams. ‘The twisted childhood universe’ – as Brit filmmaker Rhys Frake-Waterfield and his producer partner Scott Chambers have dubbed their gory bastardisation of Winnie-the-Pooh and Bambi – continues with another grisly spin on a kids-lit staple.  

Having lost his parents and best friend, schoolboy James (Cameron Bell) falls under the care of his granddad Geppetto (Richard Brake) in a creepy gothic pile. The old man has been beavering away on a new creation to help keep the ‘kiddo’ happy: a talking wooden boy he’s whittled for James in his dank basement. Finally, James will have a companion he won’t lose to mortality. Like Collodi’s tale, we’re not encouraged to preoccupy ourselves with how Pinocchio (voiced by Jude-Evan Lloyd) can talk or how his consciousness works.

Instead, goaded by his ‘tree mother’ in the wall downstairs, and the demonic Jiminy Cricket – no jaunty umbrella and top hat for this creepy bastard – whispering in his ear, Pinocchio embarks on a killing spree to protect his young human friend from any tenuous threat. In Collodi’s story, his nose grows when he lies. Here, it also does it when he wants to gore a schoolyard bully to death.

Another grisly spin on a kids-lit staple

Frake-Waterfield works wonders with his wooden monster and meagre budget, but Pinocchio: Unstrung isn’t funny enough to work as a fairy tale spin on the M3GAN or Chucky demonic-toy horror, and it’s not scary enough to land as a straight scare fest. Admiration for the puppeteering is undermined by a screenplay that mistakes swearing for wit and displays an unpleasant misogynistic streak in its victimisation and language (‘bitch’ is a recurrent insult). It doesn’t do much with its characters either. I had no clue what James and his two young friends were up to while Pinocchio embarked on his murderous spree. Geppetto is often AWOL, too.

It is an improvement on Frake-Waterfield’s debut, Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey, a rancid skew on A A Milne that turned the Hundred Acre Wood into a charnel house, and Brake, once the Night King in Game of Thrones, delivers lugubrious gravitas. And unlike Blood and Honey, this one at least runs with the grain of the original IP, where Collodi’s Pinocchio also had to learn from his mistakes. We’re just that little extra thankful now that none of them involved pulling anyone’s face off. 

In UK and Ireland cinemas Fri Jul 24.