British indie director Reece Flake-Waterfield achieved some notoriety with his 2023 film Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey, but with an interesting sketch idea at best, there’s little support for a full-length horror film, let alone a very lame sequel. But it wasn’t bad enough to be memorable enough to land a cult following or a Razzie Award shelf, and both were discovered. As a prankster on a limited budget, Flake Waterfield has a lot of technical resourcefulness and even a bit of wit. Both of those things are once again evident in his latest film, Pinocchio: Unstrung, as well as a glaring deficiency in storytelling and basic fear-mongering. Anyone tickled by the evil Winnie the Pooh might be thrilled by the evil Pinocchio, but the director’s so-called “twisted childhood world” is still a pretty old idea, and one not mined with great audacity here.
Conceptually, a Pinocchio horror movie is less of a lark than a Winnie the Pooh horror movie. The main reason for this is that “Pinocchio,” in its original pre-Disney format, was already creepy enough as a story. It strayed too far from Carlo Collodi’s 19th-century novel, but Guillermo del Toro’s Oscar-winning 2022 stop-motion version recaptures some of its dark spirit with its fascist Italian milieu, flashes of Baroque violence, and the vividly personified presence of death throughout. However, since it didn’t feature the wooden marionette of the same name gleefully peeling the skin off people’s faces, Pinocchio: Unchained has its own USP.
What it certainly has in common with del Toro’s films is Pinocchio’s own lumpy, crumbly, crude, handmade design, a far cry from the smooth, rounded cartoon children of many childhood imaginations, a pleasing triumph for the film’s puppetry and animatronics department, on which the film rests comfortably. (They’re also proudly featured in the behind-the-scenes footage that plays over the end credits.) Most of the gore effects here are similarly organic and old-school. “Pinocchio: Unstrung” isn’t particularly scary by any means, and even the jump scares are oddly muffled, but it’s plenty gory and gruesome in all the ways a cheesy, cheerful slasher should be.
There’s more visual initiative on display here than in Blood and Honey, but like that film, it begins with a simply animated prologue. In a style reminiscent of shadow puppet theater, it lays out the tenuous backstory of how Geppetto (a wealthy British inventor played in this contemporary novel by Game of Thrones alum Richard Brake, who is more mad scientist than humble carpenter) came to make wood in a deliberate effort to create artificial life. When his grandson James (Cameron Bell) is orphaned in a car accident, he takes in another surrogate son, but isolates the two boys in a creepy Gothic mansion until Pinocchio’s restless, rule-breaking curiosity gets the better of him.
Although James is initially taken aback by this conversation log, the two soon bond as brothers, and James smuggles his new friend to school in his backpack, against Geppetto’s firm orders that Pinocchio never leave the house. There, Pinocchio witnesses James being bullied by his friends and his instinct for revenge arises. (He also witnesses James going to the dentist after school, and sees red as well. Suffice it to say, the doll’s sense of right and wrong needs some fine-tuning.) From here on, the film staggers from one brutally bloody set piece to the next, most of it rather loosely set up by Flake-Waterfield’s semi-coherent screenplay. Pinocchio also harvests human organs, believing that he too will become human organs. (The fact that Geppetto had not given him masculinity did not escape his notice.) The most original murder here – set in a school gym, death signaled by a treadmill or falling weights – is also the least motivated, but that doesn’t matter.
Sharper, raunchier jokes would make up for the funnier writing here, and there would be a little more stilted Vim in the performances, but it’s especially fun to hear Robert Englund come out as the cursed (and anonymous) incarnation of Jiminy Cricket. On the other hand, the film’s gritty, tactile visual rewards are at times let down by a muddy sound mix. So Pinocchio: Unstrung is an exercise in trapeze and roundabouts, but it also shows Flake-Waterfield settling into his style and ethos as a filmmaker. His taunts may be goofy, but they feel more animated here than in the previous work, and less calculated for their viral impact. As a B-horror writer, he may still be a real boy.
