‘Pinocchio: Unstrung’ Review: Killer Puppetry in a Killer Puppet Movie

British indie director Rhys Frake-Waterfield gained a measure of notoriety for his 2023 film “Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey,” at best an amusing sketch idea that could hardly support a feature-length horror movie, let alone a very slapdash sequel. But it wasn’t memorably bad enough to merit either cultists or a shelf full of Razzies, both of which it found: As a prankster on a shoestring budget, Frake-Waterfield has technical resourcefulness and even a bit of wit. Both are again in evidence on his latest, “Pinocchio: Unstrung,” though so are are clear shortfalls in storytelling and basic scare-mongering. Anyone who was tickled by an evil Pooh Bear may get a kick out of an evil Pinocchio, but the director’s so-called Twisted Childhood Universe remains a pretty old-hat idea, not mined here with any great daring.

Conceptually, a Pinocchio horror film is less of a lark than a Winnie-the-Pooh one, in large part because “Pinocchio,” in its original pre-Disney form, was already plenty macabre as a story. Though it too strayed pretty far from Carlo Collodi’s 19th-century novel, Guillermo del Toro’s Oscar-winning 2022 stop-motion version reclaimed some of that dark spirit with a Fascist Italy milieu, baroque flashes of violence and the vividly personified presence of Death throughout. It did not, however, feature the eponymous wooden marionette gleefully peeling the skin off people’s faces, so “Pinocchio: Unstrung” has its own USP.

What it does have in common with del Toro’s film is the craggy, splintery, roughly handmade design of Pinocchio himself, a far cry from the smoothly rounded cartoon child of many childhood imaginations — and something of a triumph for the film’s puppetry and animatronic departments, on whom the film is pleasingly reliant. (They’re also proudly showcased in behind-the-scenes footage that runs through the closing credits.) The gore effects here are, for the most part, similarly organic and old-school: “Pinocchio: Unstrung” is never especially frightening, and even its jump scares are oddly muffled, but it is abundantly gross and grisly in all the ways a cheap-and-cheerful slasher should be. 

There’s more visual initiative on display here than there was in “Blood and Honey,” though it starts, like that film, with a simply animated prologue. Styled to evoke shadow theater, it lays out the thin backstory of how Geppetto — a wealthy British inventor in this contemporary telling, more mad scientist than humble carpenter, and played by “Game of Thrones” alum Richard Brake — came to craft the timber tyke in a deliberate effort to create artificial life. When his grandson James (Cameron Bell) is orphaned following a car accident, he takes on another surrogate son, but keeps the two boys separate in his spooky Gothic mansion, until Pinocchio’s restless, rule-breaking curiosity gets the better of him.

Though James is initially freaked out by this talking log, it isn’t long before the two bond as brothers, and James — against Geppetto’s firm orders that Pinocchio never leave the house — smuggles his new friend to school in his backpack. There, Pinocchio witnesses James being bullied by his peers, and his vengeful instincts kick in. (He also witnesses James’ dental appointment after school, and similarly sees red: Suffice it to say the puppet’s sense of right and wrong needs some tweaking.) From here, the film lurches from one brutally bloody setpiece to the next, most of them rather sketchily set up by Frake-Waterfield’s semi-coherent script, as Pinocchio also harvests the human organs that he believes will make him one of them. (The fact that Geppetto gave him no manhood has not escaped his notice.) The most inventive kill here — set in a school gym, cuing death by treadmill and falling weights — is also the least motivated, but no matter.

Sharper, nastier jokes would make up for the more slipshod writing here, as would a bit more high-camp vim in the performances, though it’s fun hearing Robert Englund pop up as a particularly cursed (and nameless) incarnation of Jiminy Cricket. Meanwhile, the film’s scrappy, tactile visual rewards are sometimes let down by a muddy sound mix. “Pinocchio: Unstrung” is an exercise in swings and roundabouts, then, but it also shows Frake-Waterfield settling into a style and ethos as a filmmaker: His provocations may be goofy, but here they feel more spirited, and less calculated for viral impact, than in his previous work. As B-horror auteurs go, he may yet be a real boy.