PINOCCHIO: UNSTRUNG (2026)

Studio:   ITN Distribution
Director: Rhys Frake-Waterfield
Writer:   Rhys Frake-Waterfield
Producer: Rhys Frake-Waterfield, Scott Chambers
Stars:    Cameron Bell, Jack Art Gray, Jessica Balmer, Richard Brake, Robert Englund

Review Score:

---

Summary:

A puppeteer hiding a macabre secret creates a companion for his grandson, which unwittingly sparks a string of gruesome deaths.

---

Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Claiming he wants his grandson James, who came to live with him following the death of his parents and whose best friend Zach recently died, to never lose anyone again, puppet maker Geppetto creates Pinocchio, a sentient boy made from wood, to be James’s companion. Geppetto explicitly instructs James to not tell anyone about Pinocchio’s existence. Initially frightened by the puppet’s unsettling appearance, James and Pinocchio begin playing together and develop a close bond where Pinocchio comes to see himself as James’s protector.

Woodmother, another sentient creature whose organic tree roots leave her fused to a wall in Geppetto’s basement workshop, privately tells Pinocchio that although Geppetto carved their bodies, she shaped Pinocchio’s mind. When Woodmother tells Pinocchio he is merely a puppet, Pinocchio angrily responds that he is a real boy, which causes his pointy nose to extend. Woodmother says if Pinocchio truly wishes to be real, he needs to wear human skin.

James points out his dead friend Zach and his other best friend Dudley in a photograph that Pinocchio asks about. James also shows the puppet a secret handshake and is surprised to see that Pinocchio already knows it.

After warning the puppet that no one can see him move, James takes Pinocchio to school without telling Geppetto. At one point during the day, Pinocchio sneaks away to a staff gym where his frightening appearance causes a strange chain of accidents that gruesomely kills Miss Daniels and another schoolteacher.

A classmate named Trey, his toadie Logan, and their girlfriends Amanda and Georgia humiliatingly harass James until James’s other friend Mia breaks up the bullying. Pinocchio overhears James wishing that his bullies were dead.

James shows Mia and Dudley that Pinocchio is alive. James explains Pinocchio’s sentience by claiming the puppet is operated by advanced AI.

After school, James goes to a dentist appointment. Spying on the dental work from James’s backpack, Pinocchio is horrified by the painful procedures he observes.

Following his dentist appointment, James is driven home in a car that gets violently struck by a drunk driver. Christopher Robin and another nurse tend to James during his subsequent hospital stay. Wanting revenge for what happened to James, Pinocchio sneaks through the hospital halls to track down the drunk driver, whom he then kills by ripping off his face and tearing out his organs to put inside himself like Woodmother instructed.

Geppetto brings James home from the hospital. Mia and Dudley visit and help James sneak Pinocchio back down to the basement workshop. James tells Pinocchio to stay put, but Pinocchio insists James is in danger and he must protect him.

In Geppetto’s workshop, Mia finds a collection of disturbing drawings and papers indicating Geppetto has been performing Frankenstein-like experiments. Suspicious, Mia takes several film canisters to find out what Geppetto was doing.

Upon learning Pinocchio killed someone, Woodmother gleefully encourages him to continue murdering “bad” people to keep James safe. She also reminds Pinocchio that he must take what his victims have if he wants to finally become whole.

James, Mia, and Dudley watch Geppetto’s films, which feature recordings of his bizarre experiments. They learn Geppetto discovered a way to cheat death by shaping lifeforms into wooden puppets with motor functions. However, none of his experiments, some of whom were brutally euthanized, had memories of their prior lives until Pinocchio. Geppetto then introduced James to the puppet with the hope that external stimuli would trigger memories of who Pinocchio previously was.

Explaining that Woodmother sent him to make sure Pinocchio follows her guidance, a sentient Cricket perches on the puppet’s shoulder. Falsely claiming she is collecting teeth, Cricket leads Pinocchio back to James’s dentist. Thinking her a horrible woman, Pinocchio tortures and kills the dentist to take her teeth for his own mouth.

Upon realizing Pinocchio is missing, James has Dudley call his phone. Pinocchio answers, and he excitedly shows James, Dudley, and Mia how he took the dentist’s teeth. Pinocchio explains his belief that he is killing bad people in order to help James.

Presuming Pinocchio will target James’s bully Trey next, James, Mia, and Dudley go to try and stop him. Geppetto separately discovers Pinocchio is missing and later learns of the puppet’s plan to kill James’s bullies.

Pinocchio tracks down the four friends who harassed James at school. Cricket helps Pinocchio mutilate and electrocute Georgia in a backyard pool. Cricket also guides Pinocchio in killing Logan and pulling out his eyes. They then go inside the house and attack Amanda in the shower, ultimately tearing off her scalp to give Pinocchio hair. Finally, Pinocchio repeatedly grows his nose to use as stakes that pin Trey to a wall before he too is killed and Pinocchio completes his ghoulish body.

Geppetto arrives at the grisly murder scene. Disgusted and angry to see what Pinocchio did, Geppetto takes the puppet back home and locks him in the basement. Realizing Woodmother lied to him, Pinocchio confronts her for tricking him into doing bad things and making everyone hate him. Woodmother taunts Pinocchio by expressing jealousy. Pinocchio uses a mallet to crush Cricket and then beat Woodmother to death.

Geppetto tells Pinocchio he wants to be real because of his past. Escorting him deeper into the basement lair, Geppetto takes the puppet into a room with a massive, macabre tree. Geppetto explains that lifeforces grow through the tree’s roots and fuse with the wood, which he then shapes into his puppets. He also shows Pinocchio that he still has one of his feral, failed experiments locked in a cage.

James, Mia, and Dudley return home in time to overhear Geppetto reveal that he made Pinocchio from James’s dead friend Zach. Geppetto prepares to execute Pinocchio with a shotgun, but he is distracted by the three kids. Geppetto shoots and kills Dudley.

Pinocchio, James, and Mia retreat to the room with the tree. Geppetto tries calming his grandson by claiming he can bring Dudley back to life. Geppetto and Mia fight until James recovers from being momentarily knocked out and rescues Mia.

Pinocchio picks up the shotgun and has a confrontation with his creator. Geppetto’s words inspire Pinocchio to shoot the lock on the cage containing the feral puppet. That puppet viciously kills Geppetto. With a fire starting to spread, Pinocchio, James, and Mia escape outside as Geppetto Manor burns.

---

Review:

“Pinocchio: Unstrung” marks the fifth film in the ever-expanding “Twisted Childhood Universe,” and if the movie’s completely unexpected upswing in overall quality becomes a trend, it might only take five more films before this series that was once borderline unwatchable becomes outright recommendable. Someone could potentially argue “Pinocchio: Unstrung” is the “best” in the heap of horror based on public domain children’s properties. Alternatively, that someone might meet more success if they instead settled for saying “Pinocchio: Unstrung” is at least the “most tolerable” among this specific quintet.

This is probably the closest a modern B-movie has come to replicating the free-wheeling feel of a cheesy Full Moon feature rented from Blockbuster in the 1990s. One of the reasons “Pinocchio: Unstrung” works as well as it does is that it comes across as more harmless than its predecessors. The two “Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey” movies (review here and review here) were pure cash grabs with no creative ambition beyond being standard slashers. “Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare” (review here) gave itself cement shoes and jumped into dark waters with implied pedophilia and a junkie Tinkerbell doped up on heroin. Choosing to not take itself as drearily serious as all that, “Pinocchio: Unstrung” is visibly more comfortable in somewhat silly skin, so it has a lot more pop to its personality.

Richard Brake’s featured role as Geppetto provides an apt example of how “Pinocchio: Unstrung” shares a sensibility with the “Child’s Play” series, not because they both involve diminutive dolls, but because they both have a comedic tongue in their cheek without campiness compromising creepiness. Less of a lonely puppet maker and more of a mad scientist playing Doctor Frankenstein with sentient creatures shaped from a “magic” tree, Brake balances his gentle grandfather side with a sinister secret-keeper clearly up to something evil. He chews on mouthfuls of menace and then compassionate concern unequally, yet there’s something about the way he gives a little too much of one particular note at any given time that fits the film’s kooky texture rather than seeming totally hammy.

Robert Englund provides another hit of name recognition, something none of the previous TCU movies had in their lists of unknown actors. Don’t expect to see much of him though, or any of him at all, really. Englund provides the voice for the computer-animated Jiminy Cricket character. A generous guess estimates he has less than two total minutes of dialogue, if that. Englund almost certainly never showed up on set and possibly even recorded his scant handful of lines over the phone, bringing a new definition to whatever the term is for a genre celebrity’s quickie cameo with a disproportionate ratio of salary to screentime.

For the story’s setup, Geppetto creates Pinocchio supposedly as a companion for his grandson James. Initially frightened by the living puppet’s unsettling appearance, James and Pinocchio become best friends, with Pinocchio coming to consider himself the boy’s protector. Unfortunately, Pinocchio is too innocent to know any better when another terrifying tree creature tells him if he wants to become a real boy, ne needs to kill people and use their body parts to continue building himself.

Pinocchio’s murder spree starts unintentionally. In one of the more nonsensically conceived sequences, the puppet sneaks out of the backpack James brought him to school in, and his curiosity leads him to a staff gym where two schoolteachers happen to be working out. Pinocchio’s frightening face startles one of the teachers so badly that she falls on her treadmill, setting off a domino line of odd accidents that mangles her body, causes a nearby weightlifter to literally break in half when he too trips, and leaves the helpless teacher to have a series of heavy barbell weighs successively fall on her pulped face while a shocked Pinocchio shouts, “Jesus!”

That’s far from the only absurdly placed predicament. In another scene, James abruptly cuts out on his friends after school to suddenly head to a dentist appointment. After the appointment, James is taken home in an ordinary car with an unidentified man behind the wheel. The only person unaccounted for in the credits is a “Taxi Driver,” but this vehicle is not a taxi and the driver refers to James by name while asking him how he feels. The car gets sideswiped by a drunk driver, which explains why the plot couldn’t afford to hospitalize Geppetto alongside his grandson, but that doesn’t make this peculiar arrangement of events any less of a headscratcher.

Hey, what else should anyone expect from a script constructed out of easy-to-use tropes like someone knocked unconscious at just the right time only to recover at an even more serendipitous moment, a late exposition dump courtesy of convenient video diaries shot on film for no reason other than it makes the footage look freakier, and the heroes escaping a burning building at the end of a fiery finale? The reality is, “Pinocchio: Unstrung” makes its money on the nostalgic naughtiness of unnecessary nudity, plenty of ghastly mutilations and murders made with practical effects, and light gags that crack jokes without cracking the goofy/gory tone.

These TCU movies aren’t going away anytime soon, and Full Moon will never produce the same caliber of quirky projects they put out decades ago. Willingly or unwillingly, maybe it’s simply time to go with the flow of getting gruesome with a weirdo premise. They may not make low-budget horror movies like they used to, but “Pinocchio: Unstrung” brings the TCU a little closer to capturing the same entertaining blend of frights and fun that paved the way for this type of toony terror in the first place.

Review Score: 60

---