Bambi: Reckoning and Peter Pan's Neverland Nightmare - Rob's Review

Get Bambi: The Reckoning on DVD

Get Peter Pan's Neverland Nightmare on DVD

You all know I love watching horror as much as I love reading and writing it.

Jagged Edge Productions struck oil with Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey. The minute Winnie-the-Pooh entered the public domain, they were all over it. With an extremely low budget, laughable costumes, and a genuinely creepy premise, they hugely tapped into horror audiences. Made for approximately $50,000, Blood and Honey grossed nearly $8 million.

That success spawned the Twisted Childhood Universe (or the “Poohniverse,” which is just more fun to say.) Jagged Edge has now made five films in the universe, with Pinocchio Unstrung launching this weekend. I cannot wait to see it. I have watched Blood and Honey and its sequel, and I will eventually write reviews for both. At the end of the day, though, they were serviceable entries in the horror genre.

Last weekend, I decided to venture further into the Twisted Childhood Universe with Bambi: The Reckoning and Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare.

Let’s start with Bambi.

Bambi: The Reckoning is a bit of a mess.

The premise works, although I wish they had moved away from the animated introductions they tend to use in these films. Watching Bambi’s mother get shot, followed later by his mate, could have been far more traumatic and effective had it unfolded outside an animated, narrated opening.

Bambi as a mutated killer is fun. The practical effects are well done, and there is plenty of gore. The film is extremely dark (literally) with much of it taking place in the woods. Bambi is kept mostly within the darkness and shadows, which helps prevent the creature from looking ridiculous in the way Winnie-the-Pooh and his friends sometimes do in their plastic masks.

The main cast is fine, but nobody really stands out because the script simply is not very good. A mother and son travel into the middle of nowhere to visit the boy’s paternal family and somehow stumble directly into a trap being set for Bambi. The setup mostly exists to provide the film with a large collection of victims who can be killed in increasingly insane ways.

The horror tropes are especially heavy in this one. Characters repeatedly wander off alone, run directly into danger, and make unbelievably stupid decisions while trying to survive.

The ending is also anticlimactic. I almost would have preferred to see Bambi simply disappear back into the woods. Instead, the conclusion undercuts much of what came before it. If Bambi could be taken down with a handful of handgun rounds, this entire ordeal should have ended much sooner.

These films generally run under an hour and a half, and somehow Bambi: The Reckoning still feels too long. It seems to go on for hours, repeating the same premise and variations of the same kills. It does not have the depth, energy, or passion of Blood and Honey, a film made by people who seemed genuinely excited by what they had discovered. Overall, Bambi: The Reckoning was a miss.

BUT…

Then I watched Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare.

W O W.

This is easily the best film in Jagged Edge’s Twisted Childhood Universe so far.

It is a wild ride built around the Peter Pan story in the loosest possible way. It is psychological, dark, and completely f--ked up. The performances are significantly better, particularly Martin Portlock as Peter. He is brilliant. Peter is damaged and disturbing from the moment he appears, but as the film progresses, we gradually begin to understand just how deeply insane he really is.

There are several genuinely disturbing sequences, including the fact that Peter murders a busload of schoolchildren with the intention of “sending them to Neverland.”

The ways the film incorporates characters such as Tinker Bell and Hook are shocking, but they work within the psychology of this story. This Peter Pan is a drug-fuelled murderer who believes he is saving children by killing them and sending them to Neverland.

Megan Placito plays Wendy, our final girl, and she is terrific. She is the perfect adversary for Peter. Kit Green is also disturbingly effective as Tinker Bell, although I can see the treatment of that character becoming controversial. I will not spoil it directly, but it is one of the most thought-provoking and twisted elements of the film.

Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare is far better than I expected it to be.

Apparently, an earlier version of the film would have incorporated the actual Neverland more heavily, with a much larger fantasy component. Budget and special-effects limitations forced the filmmakers to take a more grounded psychological approach instead, and it works.

The film is not without imperfections. The storyline involving Joey is somewhat difficult to follow, and there are the usual plot holes that come with this kind of horror movie. However, those flaws are easy to overlook because the central story is so captivating. This version of Peter Pan is as effective as almost any modern horror monster.

So, to wrap things up: the Twisted Childhood Universe is worth investing some time in, provided you understand what you are getting into. The films are cheap, violent, ridiculous and often wildly uneven, but they are also clearly building toward something. So far, that journey culminates in Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare, which is easily the strongest film in the universe.

Next comes Pinocchio Unstrung, which is receiving some surprisingly positive early reviews.

Robert Englund as Jiminy Cricket?

Yes, please.