Studio:   ITN Distribution
Director: Dan Allen
Writer:   Rhys Warrington
Producer: Rhys Frake-Waterfield, Scott Jeffrey
Stars:    Roxanne McKee, Samira Mighty, Nicola Wright, Tom Mulheron, Russell Geoffrey Banks, Joseph Greenwood, Alex Cooke, Adrian Relph

Review Score:

Summary:

A mutated deer pursued by secretive hunters terrorizes a family stranded in the woods during the creature’s deadly rampage.

Synopsis:

Following the tragic death of his mother at the hands of a hunter, Bambi the deer grows up to a have a family of his own. However, men secretly dumping toxic chemicals in the woods kill Bambi’s mate with their vehicle and take his offspring captive. Bambi later drinks from the contaminated water and mutates into a deadly creature.

Upset to discover her husband Simon is no longer coming with them, Xana still books a taxi to take her and her son Benji to visit Simon’s family at a remote home in the woods. During the drive, Xana dodges her observant son’s concerns about ongoing trouble in his mother and father’s marriage.

Bambi violently rams the taxi along a dark forest road, causing it to overturn. As Bambi continues attacking the vehicle, Xana and Benji flee while the trapped taxi driver is crushed.

Xana and Benji make it to the house where Simon’s brothers Andrew and Joshua, their dementia-afflicted mother Mary, Andrew’s wife Harriet, and Harriet’s annoying teenage son Harrison are waiting. Throughout the evening, Mary repeatedly mutters, stares strangely into the surrounding trees, and draws disturbing sketches of a monstrous deer.

After hearing what happened to Xana and Benji, Joshua goes alone to the crash site to investigate. Michael, Eddie, and Tyler, three hunters searching the woods for Bambi, accidentally shoot and kill Joshua.

Back at the house, Bambi charges through a window to attack the family. Xana, Benji, Andrew, Harrison, and Mary escape to a vehicle outside, but Harriet is torn in half by Bambi’s antlers. After the remaining family members speed away, the three hunters investigate the house later and Michael euthanizes Harriet.

The family’s vehicle is stopped by a fallen tree in the road. Andrew and Harrison get out to move the obstruction. When Bambi suddenly attacks, Benji is forced to immediately drive away. Harrison is left behind by himself while Andrew dies gruesomely when he gets caught in a rope and dragged along the road.

After the vehicle runs out of gas, Mary wanders into the forest. Xana and Benji chase after the old woman and the trio ends up in a clearing of grisly human remains from Bambi’s various victims. Meanwhile, a herd of mutated rabbits mauls Harrison to death.

Michael, Eddie, and Tyler find Xana, Benji, and Mary and bring the trio back to their basecamp. There, Xana discovers the hunters, which include a fourth person named Jo, are working for her husband Simon, who was responsible for the toxic waste spill and has been hunting the mutant animals as part of a coverup.

Xana demands to call the police due to the deaths, but Simon refuses for fear of his crimes being exposed. Michael pulls a gun on Xana to force her to hand over a phone.

Bambi beheads Tyler while he relieves himself in the woods. Bambi mauls Eddie next. Cornered by Bambi, Jo shoots a gas canister whose resulting explosion kills her, but not the deer.

Benji frees the small fawn that the hunters took from Bambi and takes it into the woods. Xana chases after her son. Determined to recover the fawn, Michael also follows. Meanwhile, Mary has an encounter with Bambi, but the mutant deer leaves her alone.

Upon finding Xana and Benji, Simon and Michael demand that the boy turn over the fawn. Bambi gores Michael on his antlers and runs off into the trees with him. Xana tries recovering Michael’s dropped phone to call for help, but Simon stops his wife and says he won’t allow her to ruin his life.

Simon runs away when Bambi comes back. Simon ends up mauled to death by a mutated rabbit when he tries fleeing in his vehicle.

Realizing Bambi wants its offspring, Xana and Benji reunite the two deer. However, Michael unexpectedly returns in a bloodied state to shoot Bambi to the ground. Mary retaliates by shooting Michael dead. Mary, Xana, and Benji solemnly observe as the fawn mourns Bambi’s apparent death.

Review:

“Bambi: The Reckoning” follows “Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey” (review here), “Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey 2” (review here), and “Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare” (review here) as the fourth official entry in “The Twisted Childhood Universe” series, formerly known as the “Poohniverse.” I won’t say “best,” because that word implies a level of heightened quality that doesn’t exist in this context, but I might say “Bambi: The Reckoning” is probably the “most watchable” of the four films thus far. Before mistaking that as a tacit endorsement, bear in mind this ramshackle franchise doesn’t even have minimum standards to meet. Ranking one above another is like saying it’s better to chew on broken glass than on rusty nails. Maybe that’s true, but neither of those things should be in your mouth in the first place.

Like its predecessors, “Bambi: The Reckoning” begins with an animated prologue to lay out the backstory. Oddly though, where the animated opening was one of the few highlights of at least the first “Blood and Honey” film, this animation is much cruder, looking like jagged construction paper shapes jittering around with the erratic anatomy of a Terrance and Phillip cartoon.

Accompanying narration explains how, after his mother’s memorable murder at the hands of a hunter, Bambi grew up to have a family of his own. Tragedy and trauma have a way of finding the doomed deer, unfortunately. Mean men dumping toxic waste in the woods ran over Bambi’s mate, kidnapped his offspring, and left Bambi to drink contaminated water that transformed him into a vengeful beast.

“Bambi: The Reckoning” sort of addresses one common complaint about these movies, which is that, despite supposedly raking in significant sums of money from all over the world, none of that cash ever appears reinvested in making subsequent films look better. Here, however, producers seem to have spent some coin to create the creature. Not a lot, mind you. But enough that at a minimum, Bambi can compete with an average Syfy monster movie for whose economical effects are least offensive to the eyes.

The setup, on the other hand, remains exactly the same as every other TCU movie. The only difference is that instead of a stocky stuntman in an animalized Halloween mask, now we have an actual animal tearing apart people across a rudimentary plot that has hapless folks splitting up, splitting off, and getting split in half as Bambi stalks a family and a group of hunters in a dark forest.

In addition to cheapness, “Bambi: The Reckoning” carries over another issue with these public domain horror movies, with that problem being that there’s no authentic narrative relation to the expired property being exploited. Sure, there’s a deer dishing out gruesome demises on its antlers and under its hooves. There’s even a winking hint of Thumper-related terror with a herd of rabid rabbits getting in on the neck-gnawing action.

Yet there’s never even a glint of feeling like you’re watching a twisted pseudo-sequel to a Disney classic. Swap the deer for a big dog, a bear, a rhinoceros, or whatever. It’s still just a killer animal running wild, with all of the characters and carnage being indistinguishable and interchangeable.

These lapsed IP horror movies aren’t “review proof,” a term that’s often misused anyway, so much as “review irrelevant.” All of them should probably be automatically ranked a flat 50/100 from this point forward because viewers either fall in the top half that tolerates them, perhaps even enjoys them ironically or unironically, or else they sit on the other side of that slash where those with taste know to not even give them the time of day.

“Bambi: The Reckoning” very much keeps the TCU tradition intact: a bare bones script, unknown actors, low production values, forgettable frights, and a headache-inducing hangover that’ll have audiences asking, “why in the world did I willingly watch this?” I’d ask rhetorically, but you already know which side of 50/100 you’re on.

Review Score: 50