The public domain gold rush is alive and well from one side of the globe to another, with low-budget filmmakers picking away at the mummified remains of fresh ideas from nearly a century ago. The US seems content with pedalling out three cursed Popeye films in one year, as well as a litany of Steamboat Willy skinwalkers, but in the UK, a tight-knit group of filmmakers are threading together a decidedly anti-kid cinematic universe of their own. The Twisted Childhood Universe (TCU) is the brainchild of Rhys Frakes-Waterfield of Jagged Edge Productions, a deliberately edgy cycle of childhood-ruining wannabe-cult classics heralded by the cataclysmically awful Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey movies and followed up by the miserable Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare. Rarely has the guarantee of more movies felt like a legitimate threat to public health, yet the TCU train keeps on chugging, arriving at the portentously-titled Bambi: The Reckoning. For a tale that is already traumatic enough when it’s actually aimed at children, what more could producer Frakes-Waterfield and director Dan Allen have to bring to the table? It may come as a surprise that the answer is… more than you’d think.
Opening with an animated storybook section (tradition for this franchise at this point), we’re in another world of innocence lost, with an idyllic woodland setting beset by hunters and flooded with gallons of toxic waste. We’re treated to a familiar tableaux; poor young Bambi nuzzling at the corpse of its mother, yet instead of whimsically learning how to form bonds with other species in the forest, the orphaned deer takes a sip from the glowing sludge from the nearby stream. Flipping into live-action, we catch up with sullen iPad kid Benji (Tom Mulheron) and exhausted mother Xana (Roxanne McKee) on their way to an awkward family get-together in the middle of nowhere, whose cab ride is interrupted by a now-mutated and oversized Bambi on a rampage against all humanity, making what was to be an already rubbish weekend into a waking nightmare.
The films of the TCU have forever been hampered by swathes of weak and dislikeable characters we are forced to spend time with before the carnage begins, and this is no exception; the mental arithmetic director Allen and writer Rhys Warrington make the viewer do to figure out how everyone is related to one another is a very big ask straight out of the gate, made even tougher to swallow by the fact that no one seems to be reacting in a human way to being attacked by a snarling, dribbling ten foot-tall stag. An ominous and inexplicable series of charcoal drawings from dementia-ridden grandmother Mary (TCU mainstay Nicola Wright) seem to only be there to drum up some extra suspense, much to the rolling eyes of her horrible and dismissive family. So far, so familiar; it may be enough for some to tune out entirely.
Yet while the last three entries have spent what seemed like days with our dour-faced heroes, Allen gets down to business refreshingly quickly, getting to the mutilation as fast as possible and offering them up to the feral beastie with impressive speed. Bambi isn’t one for playing hide-and-seek with his prey; he’s more of a bull in a china shop who loves nothing more than charging down folk and ripping them to pieces. As a result, this thing has some considerable momentum, occasionally stopping to fold an extra set of hunter characters into the drama, but ultimately just in service of more meatsacks for Bambi to turn into tenderised viscera. The gruey gore is admirably thick and fleshy, courtesy of some resourceful practical effects from Charlotte Bhattacharjee and Rebecca Wheeler, and the methods of dispatching the cast are varied and often creative. One particular hoot of a sequence involves a beartrap and this film’s stand-in for Thumper, nursing a horrible disease well beyond your average case of myxomatosis and closer to 28 Days Later’s rage virus, and there’s something admirably unpretentious about how the film subverts a kiddified text into something straightforwardly nasty.
That freeing sense of basic thrills is something that the TCU has never reached before, and while there isn’t much in the way of genuine surprises (as soon as another baby deer is introduced, you can see the final shot coming a mile off), this does mark the first time it prioritises genuine genre thrills over tiresome plotting and baggy narrative structures. Better yet, it takes what was also exhausting in recent A24 flop Death of a Unicorn and strips it back to the good stuff, unburdened by limp satire and cutesy lore, and leading with the simple sight of huge horned monsters wreaking havoc on the unsuspecting. Where the inevitable universe expansion can go from here is likely to be a groanworthy return to form, but at least we can treasure this brief moment of semi-entertaining mediocrity instead of humourless torture fests where the real victims are the audience.
