Hello, and welcome to the Geeky Brummie Film Roundup! Each week we take you through the biggest new cinema releases and why you should be excited for them. This week: Pinocchio gets the horror treatment…
Usual disclaimer: unless otherwise stated, I haven’t seen these movies yet so all of my opinions are based on trailers, early reviews and other rumours and buzz.
Pinocchio Unstrung
In 2022, Winnie the Pooh entered the public domain in the US. Almost immediately, filming began on a low-budget horror version named Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey that had an adult Pooh and Piglet, long abandoned by Christopher Robin, developing a bitter hatred for humans and becoming terrifying killers. Nervous about incurring the legal wrath of Disney, which still owned the copyright to its version of Pooh, director Rhys Frake-Waterfield developed a fairly standard slasher film where the killers happened to wear a bear and pig mask. Despite its low budget and even lower ratings (it has just 3% on Rotten Tomatoes), the film gained some attention online for its concept – people were horrified at their beloved childhood heroes being so mistreated, but intrigued to see a new take on them. That led to it being a surprising success – it made around $7.7 million in global box office takings, which doesn’t sound like much but, given its budget of around $100,000, that’s a 7,600% profit – more than enough for studios to greenlight some similar projects. Most Disney films are based on pre-existing stories, so a lot of their earlier back-catalogue is now in the public domain, and as a result in the last few years Frake-Waterfield’s so-called Twisted Childhood Universe has churned out Winnie the Pooh: Blood & Honey 2, Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare, and Bambi: The Reckoning. While none of them have been particularly well-received, they have all improved on the first Blood and Honey – it seems that the more the public has understood what he’s trying to do, the more confidence Frake-Waterfield has had to hew closer to the source material and find more interesting ways to adapt it.
All of this leads us to Pinocchio Unstrung, the fifth entry in the Twisted Childhood Universe and the only film brave enough to set a release date so soon after Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey sailed into cinemas. In this version, Pinocchio was created by Geppetto (Richard Brake) to be a brother to his grieving grandson James (Cameron Bell) after the death of his best friend. All Pinocchio wants is to be a real boy, but under the guidance of a creepy cricket (horror legend Robert Englund) he decides that the best way to do that is by killing people he perceives as ‘bad’ and stealing their skin.
Disney’s version of Pinocchio, while ostensibly a kids’ film, was already pretty disturbing – kids turning into donkeys, evil puppeteers, giant monstrous whales, etc – but this film spurns all of that in favour of a standard gory slasher. That being said, it looks way more intriguing than Winnie the Pooh: Blood & Honey did. Pinocchio’s character design (and Jiminy Cricket’s, for that matter) is genuinely creepy as hell, with a splintered spike of a nose that seems to get used as an offensive weapon on multiple occasions in a bloody twist on the original puppet’s nose growing when he lies. Frake-Waterfield has taken his motivation of becoming a real boy and built a horror plot around it, instead of crowbarring his characters into a generic horror plot like he did with Pooh. And that approach has worked with critics – incredibly, this currently has 100% on Rotten Tomatoes. Most of the reviews are 3 stars – it’s by no means a perfect film – but that counts as a positive score towards the total rating. One of the main points of praise is the film’s dedication to practical effects – appropriately, Pinocchio is an animatronic puppet rather than CGI.
I’ll be honest, I was quite ready to dismiss this one, but it actually looks like it has a lot going for it. The fact that it’s attracted the likes of Brake and Englund shows that the Twisted Childhood films are being taken a little more seriously – both by audiences and by the people making them – and if they carry on like this there might be hope for the franchise yet.
- Pinocchio Unstrung on IMDB
- Pinocchio Unstrung on Rotten Tomatoes
If you only see one film this week…
It’s Pinocchio Unstrung by default, but if that’s too traumatic you also have the option of watching/rewatching the Odyssey…
Still in cinemas and worth a watch
- The Odyssey – Homer’s Odyssey is classed as an epic poem, and Nolan has clearly taken the word epic and run with it. There are a few changes to the original story but for the most part it’s a pretty faithful adaptation, yet even fans of Greek mythology who think they know what’s coming will appreciate some of the visual choices that have been made. The cyclops and Circe in particular are presented in ways I’ve not seen in any other adaptation and will stick with you for a long time afterwards. The scenes of the fall of Troy are thrilling, as is the climax of the suitor plot in Odysseus’ home of Ithaca. Even Matt Damon, who initially felt like an odd choice for a Greek hero, does an incredible job as a man cursed by gods and burdened by the guilt of what his horse ploy did to the Trojans. Yes, some of the dialogue is a bit anachronistic, and there’s a lot of exposition particularly in the first act, but you get over all that pretty quickly once the action gets going. Don’t wait for this to come out on a streaming service – it deserves the biggest screen you can find it on, preferably in IMAX where you can feel the sound roaring through your seat.
- Evil Dead Burn
- Toy Story 5
Trailer of the Week
We’ve already had a few very brief teasers for Avengers: Doomsday (or rather for some of the characters we can expect to see in it) but, with the MCU about to swing back into cinemas next week with the new Spider-Man movie, we finally have our first full Doomsday trailer. There’s still very little plot to speak of, with Marvel still relying on character recognition to get people excited, but if that’s what you’re after then there are certainly plenty of characters to get excited about. The Fantastic Four, the Thunderbolts/ New Avengers, Thor and Loki, both versions of Captain America and Falcon, the X-Men (we see Professor X, Cyclops, Magneto, Mystique and Gambit here, with Beast and Nightcrawler also confirmed in the cast), Ant-Man, Shang-Chi, Black Panther, M’Baku and Namor. It’s interesting how many of these characters have been villains at one time or another – Loki, Magneto, Namor and half the New Avengers have fought against the Marvel heroes in previous films but now appear to be on the same side. By contrast, this is our first proper look at new big bad Doctor Doom, played by former good guy Robert Downey Jr, who is powerful enough to block a swing of Thor’s axe (which, you’ll remember, was enough to behead Thanos) with just a couple of fingers. The bigger the MCU gets, the stronger the enemy has to be to present any kind of threat for these team-up movies. Still, for all the heroes on display, there are plenty who are noticeable by their absence – where are Spider-Man, Hulk, Doctor Strange, Captain Marvel, Deadpool, Wasp, Hawkeye, the Guardians of the Galaxy, the Eternals, and so on? Not to mention the stars of the many Disney+ series like Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Moon Knight, She-Hulk, Ironheart, the Punisher… The MCU’s roster is huge, and the presence of Downey Jr and Chris Evans here shows that even when they try to thin it down, nothing really stays dead for long. Will Doomsday (or perhaps next week’s Spider-Man) explain why so many heroes are taking a holiday when a villain that scares even Thor is threatening the planet? We’ll find out when Doomsday hits cinemas on December 18th.
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