Whether you want to accept it or not, the Twisted Childhood Universe (aka. the Poohniverse) isn’t going anywhere. After kicking off in 2023 with the bewilderingly pointless Winnie The Pooh: Blood And Honey, we soon ballooned into a low budget, Marvelesque, connected universe that first saw Pooh and Piglet get a heavily retconed sequel and then moved on to making Peter Pan a child snatching pervert. With an inevitable team-up movie on the horizon, the next step of a franchise born entirely off the back of beloved characters tipping into the void of public domain, is Bambi: The Reckoning, which unsurprisingly cooks up a new, mangled back story to justify turning the cute little fawn into a raging engine of destruction.
But wait, what’s this? After three previous movies, is the quality of the Poohniverse suddenly starting to take an unexpected upturn? Could Bambi be the one to push the Twisted Childhood Universe into the realms of the watchable? Not quite – but it’s damn close.
Family functions are a pain in the arse at the best of times, but matters are made unavoidably worse when the family in question loathe each other’s guts. Still, ever the goody-two shoes, Xana nevertheless determined to take her son to Thanksgiving dinner at the country house of her ex-husband’s relatives despite the fact that it’s actually Simon’s turn to take Benji, but the callous shit had once again blown out. However, on the way to meet with Simon’s dementia stricken mother, Mary; brothers Andrew and Joshua; and Andrew’s bitchy wife and dickhead son, Xana and Benji find their taxi drive interrupted by some local wildlife that pits the emphasis on the word “wild”.
Years ago, a young fawn named Bambi discovered how ruthless man can be after his mother bought the farm thanks to a hunter’s bullet. But after eventually growing to a full-sized, proud stag, Bambi soon not only pairs with doe named Faline, but the two have a fawn of their own. Of course, it’s here where things go horribly south and after Faline was accidently totalled by a truck carrying toxic waste, in a fit of rage and despair, Bambi drank from a contaminated river and is promptly mutated into a gnarled, twisted, engine of deer-like destruction that’s fueled by pure rage.
After attacking Xena and Benji’s taxi and flipping it like a dominio, the terrified pair mamage to make it to the family house in one piece where their relatives poo-poo the notion of a ‘roided up deer tearing up anything it comes across. Of course, Bambi isn’t one for just lurking in the woods and quickly brings the fight into the house, but as the dysfunctional family scatter, it soon comes to light that other elements are involved. What does a band of hunters, Simon himself and his muddy-minded mother all have to do with the kicking off of this particular stag party?
Say what you will about the output of the Poohniverse so far, each installment has managed to be something of an improvement on the last. While the original Pooh movie took the form of a dreary and strangely humourless trudge through slasher town, it’s sequel managed to perk things up slightly by introducing other fucked-up versions of the bear’s community and a flaming chainsaw. From there we got Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare which saw the boy who never grew up envisioned as a scarred child murderer doing an iffy impersonation of Heath Ledger’s Joker – however, due to added layers of sleaze and a very nasty attitude, the film actually contained a plot and technically was another step up the quality ladder for the curious franchise.
However, with Bambi: The Reckoning, the Poohniverse has probably come the closest it’s ever come to delivering a good, solid, standalone, trashy, horror as it mercifully ditches the slasher/psycho conventions that the franchise has been playing in thus far and instead delves into the monster movie genre with its titular beast. If fact, the whole twisted fairy tale aspect could probably be ditched and the Bambi stuff scrubbed and it wouldn’t actually effect the plot in the slightest as the sight of a feral buck tearing the heads off people fits the Animal Attack genre just as well. I mean, if we’ve had killer boars, killer barracuda and even killer sheep in the past, why shouldn’t we have a killer mutant deer movie and it’s times like this I really wished I allowed myself to give half stars to my ratings as two stars does actually feel a little stingy for a film that really does seem to be trying legitimate hard.
Of course, that doesn’t mean that Bambi: The Reckoning is good enough to score a three star rating, because for a lot of its runtime, it continuously keeps tumbling down the standard pitfalls the franchise has always suffered from. For a start, there’s a bit too much wandering in the woods going on that relentlessly pad out the story and it certainly doesn’t help that a clutch of underwritten characters are mostly played by actors who struggle to nail even the most natural sounding line reading. Furthermore, there’s a weird subplot going on involving the dementia suffering matriarch of the family who appears to have some sort of connection to Bambi that’s never actually explained. Not only has she been scribbling pictures of the hulking stag like she has some sort of unexplained supernatural connection to it despite the beast no having supernatural origins, but her dementia is seemingly (and ridiculously) cured by a climactic explosion so the whole sub-plot is left hanging in the air and also, the continuing family drama between Xana, Simon and little Benji is about as involving as watching deer shit.
However, one thing that greatly benefits the movie is the fact that Bambi’s CGI looks pretty fucking good for a low budget horror film as the eponymous beast gores, decapitates and bisects his victims with reckless abandon. In fact, the kills are pretty good too and actually involves some good set ups and even better delivery. One poor fucker is inadvertently dragged behind a camper van until his face is ground down to the bone, and in the film’s best moment l, we even get a fun cameo from a chemically mutated Thumper as another character is taken down by flesh-eating rabbits much in the same way Peter Stormare bit the dust in the first Jurassic Park sequel.
On top of the nicely competent monster and gore effects, the presence of Game Of Thones’ Roxanne McKee means that despite the rather weak human characters, we have an actress who is able to illicit some amount of sympathy when Bambi isn’t on screen, eating someone’s kneecaps. However, a minor rise in quality means something of a major victory for the Poohniverse as a sinister version of Pinocchio waits in the wings. A near-decent movie in the Twisted Childhood Universe? Deer God.
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