PINOCCHIO: UNSTRUNG Review: Poohniverse Unfortunately Continues to Live Up to Its Name

If the recent boom of public domain horror has proven anything, it's that making something scary that wasn't originally scary rarely makes it truly scary.

The filmmakers at Jagged Edge Productions have discovered this and continued anyway. Subversions of Winnie-the-Pooh in the dismal Blood and Honey films proved there's one joke to making the inhabitants of the Hundred Acre Wood into Leatherface and co. and it's not a particularly funny one, while the Black Phone-ification of J.M. Barrie in Peter Pan's Neverland Nightmare really begged questions of "who is this for?" and "when will it stop, oh god, please, when will it stop?"

Only their admirably straightforward and savage take on Bambi (subtitle: The Reckoning) came close to understanding how to turn something so innocent into an enjoyable slaughterfest, because, well, a giant deer trampling people into a fine paste is a rather entertaining sight.

For their fifth attempt at building a 'Twisted Childhood Universe' (TCU, but more amusing known as the 'Poohniverse'), Jagged Edge creatives Rhys Frake-Waterfield and Scott Chambers turn to Carlo Collodi's wannabe-real boy puppet Pinocchio, most famously brought to life by Walt Disney for his second feature film production. There are numerous strange and uncanny scenarios in that film and in its source material that make it perfect to extrapolate horror from, an inherent eeriness to the melancholy idea of an unreal thing wanting nothing more than to be real.

With a fresh title that promises something with a couple of screws loose, Pinocchio: Unstrung arrives with one foot in the world of whimsy and the other in darkness. This is an open goal this time, surely?

Opening with narration by a treacle-voiced Gepetto (horror veteran Richard Brake) and visualised with handmade shadow puppets, it appears to be on the right track. Gepetto is grandfather to James (Cameron Bell), a boy who has lost both parents and his best friend to the cruel cosmic injustice of the world, who vows to make him a forever friend: a two foot-tall marionette called Pinocchio (voiced by Jude Evan Lloyd and mostly performed with admirable animatronics and real puppetry).

Learning about complicated customs and anatomy of humans, Pinocchio longs to be (to quote another Disney project/fairy tale Jagged Edge will rip off one day) part of their world, setting out on a flesh-flaying mission of self-actualisation for his real boy companion.

It's a simple-enough spin on the familiar to be a fun remix; the visual of a teeny-tiny freaky little guy setting off Rube Goldberg demises for unsuspecting victims is initially amusing and flippantly nasty, starting with an extremely splattery gym accident that redefines the term 'deadlifting'. Once Pinocchio gets a taste for blood, there's no end to the contrivance of how he can incapacitate people perfectly capable of throwing him out a window, tying people down and taking the chunks that he likes like a bratty kid at the pick 'n' mix station.

The DIY gore effects are impressively wet and gruey, and at the very least, you get more than your price of admission in terms of insane puppet-related deaths spread across a clippy 82 minutes.

The brand guarantee of the Twisted Childhood Universe being extremely self-consciously twisted, however, wears the honest-to-goodness base pleasures very thin very quickly. As with the first Blood and Honey film, there's a vein of misogyny that sits poorly alongside the equal-opportunities violence that most slashers with a considered thought in their head go for nowadays, having yet another bikini-based swimming pool kill that feels inorganic to the setting and plot, followed by a shower scene with a teenage character that sees a dead body previously lusted over mutilated and defiled in tiresome, unfunny fashion three times over.

A truly unhinged death late on in the film that gets breezed past so fast you barely even remember it happened veers things back on track, but unfortunately, the unconscionable damage to being a woman in a Jagged Edge picture is already done.

Frake-Waterfield and Chambers' script gives some extremely creaky dialogue to every single actor, all of whom manage to get something worthwhile out of turning up. Brake pitches his Gepetto somewhere between Vincent Price and Richard Branson, somehow both alluringly macabre and toothily smarmy at once, proving that there's a real chance for a recognisable face to emerge unscathed from one of these things (sorry, Simon Callow, Blood and Honey 2 will forever mar your body of work).

The child cast jump the hurdles of profane genital jokes and big brash cuss words quite well, with Bell managing to pull off some convincing warmth towards a hideous wooden puppet, and Jack Art Gray landing some significant chuckles as James' rotund bestie Dudley. The real star casting is Robert Englund as the film's copyright-prodding take on Jiminy Cricket, whose verbal hatred for women almost eclipses Freddy Krueger's, visualised very unpleasantly by wearing a severed nipple as a stand-in for his famous fedora. Englund's work reeks of a very quick and expensive recording session that ate up most of the budget; good for them for getting his time, but it's ultimately naffly deployed and eye-rollingly derivative.

While there is enough in the way of innovative production design mounted at a very low budget to keep you intrigued on just how they pulled a lot of it off, Pinocchio: Unstrung disappointingly remains tethered to the depressing nastiness that has defined almost every individual part of this public domain-pilfering enterprise thus far, backsliding into old habits that were tired in their first instance.

Elevated by Brake's natural talent for playing creeps, there are some signs of growth in the extremities of this indie franchise, but not enough to make their upcoming Poohniverse: Monsters Assemble seem any more fun than a nasal swab with a tree branch.