Crew
Director/Screenplay – Rhys Frake-Waterfield, Producers – Scott Chambers & Rhys Frake-Waterfield, Photography – Vince Knight, Music – Andrew Scott Bell, Visual Effects – Boiling Point Media (Supervisor – Ryan Bellgardt), Pinocchio Designed by MastersFX, Prosthetics Design – Paula Anne Booker-Harrison & Shaune Harrison, Production Design – Jamie Sneddon & Vito Veley. Production Company – Jagged Edge Productions.
Cast
Jude Evan Lloyd (Voice of Pinocchio), Cameron Bell (James), Richard Brake (Gepetto), Jessica Balmer (Mia), Jack Art Gray (Dudley), Robert Englund (Voice of Cricket), Emma Tate (Voice of Woodmother), Toni Olabantji (Trey), Karolina Knight (Amanda), Luca Marandola (Logan), Mya Brown (Georgia), Belinda Fenty (Dentist), Scott Chambers (Christopher Robin), Kelly Rian Sanson (Miss Daniels)
Plot
James is introduced by his grandfather Gepetto to something he has been building in the basement – a living wooden puppet he calls Pinocchio. James and Pinocchio fast become best friends. James even sneaks Pinocchio out of the house to school with him. Aware of the differences between the two of them, Pinocchio vows that he wants to be a real boy. When James is injured in a car accident, Pinocchio goes to the man who was driving and eviscerates him, taking his organs to fill his chest cavity. The woodmother, the living tree from which Pinocchio was formed, sends a cricket to whisper in Pinocchio’s ears and inspire him to kill others to complete a body for himself.
Scott Chambers (aka Scott Jeffrey) is a prolific British producer of low-budget horror films. He has produced over a hundred films since 2017, including assorted dinosaur, killer doll, slasher and monster movies. His greatest success to date was the Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey (2023), directed by Rhys Frake-Waterfield, which created a sensation in offering a brutal and nasty horror version of a much-loved children’s character that had just entered public domain. This led to a number of other horror takes on children’s stories around the world (many of them released from this film’s distributor ITN). Chambers and associates went on to produce a host of other horror versions of children’s stories and fairytales with the likes of Mary Had a Little Lamb (2023), Three Blind Mice (2023), Cinderella’s Curse (2024), Bambi: The Reckoning (2025) and Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare (2025).
Chambers and ITN have threatened to bring the characters together in the oft-announced shared universe Poohniverse Assemble. There are hints of that here – the hospital location is called Ashendown Hospital after the forest where Winnie the Pooh lives, while Scott Chambers can be seen on screen in a small role as a male nurse who is credited as Christopher Robin, the character that Chambers also played in Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey II (2024). In addition, there is another character credited as Mary Darling, who is meant to be the mother of Wendy and the Darling children in Peter Pan (1904).
Pinocchio is a classic children’s story, originally appearing as a series of newspaper stories by Carlo Collodi before being published in book form as The Adventures of Pinocchio (1883). The classic film version will always be the Disney animated Pinocchio (1940) but there have also been a number of other live-action versions with The Adventures of Pinocchio (1996), Roberto Benigni’s Pinocchio (2002), the Italian-made Pinocchio (2019), Robert Zemeckis’s remake of the Disney film Pinocchio (2022) and the stop-motion animated Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio (2022) to cite the most well-known. There had even been a previous horror version of the Pinocchio story with Pinocchio’s Revenge (1996).
As might be expected of Chambers and co, Pinocchio Unstrung is a dark and brutal take on the Pinocchio story. Gepetto is cast more in the model of Frankenstein and a classic Mad Scientist. The film doesn’t concern itself with too much of an adherence to the Pinocchio story, although there is a cricket (voiced by a distinctive Robert Englund) who rather than act as a conscience is urging Pinocchio on to acts of murder and mayhem. The extending nose doesn’t feature much, although the final shot of the film is a very sardonic take on this.
In many regards, Pinocchio Unstrung resembles one of Chambers’ Humpty Dumpty films – Curse of Humpty Dumpty (2021) and sequels – which concern a malevolent doll. What is noticeable is that the success of the Winnie-the-Pooh films has afforded Chambers and Rhys Frake-Waterfield more money to make their films – as such Pinocchio Unstrung could be a Humpty Dumpty film with a decent budget. This has allowed the employment of name actors like Richard Brake, a regular horror figure since his work with Rob Zombie, and Freddy Krueger himself Robert Englund as the voice of the cricket.
In addition, MastersFX, the Canadian-based makeup effects company who has done high-profile work on the Child’s Play, Underworld and Twilight films, among a great many others, have come in to provide the puppetry effects. The end credits play alongside behind-the-scenes footage of the shooting and proudly claims that the film was “Shot using practical effects and animatronic effects.” And the care and attention and better budget does produce a superior film – there is a quantum level of difference between this and the first Winnie-the-Pooh, the Humpty Dumpty films or most of Chambers’ others quickly shot video releases.
Perhaps the darkest element is showing Pinocchio engaged in acts with quite a high degree of sadism and torture and taking the organs of those he kills and placing them inside himself to become a ‘real boy’. The Pinocchio we get by the end with purloined teeth and eyeballs and a scalped head of hair becomes quite a grotesque figure. What makes this even darker is that throughout Pinocchio keeps talking in a small innocent child’s voice.
As with the Winnie-the-Pooh and other such films, Rhys Frake-Waterfield allows the action to get bloody and sadistically nasty. A teacher has her head crushed with barbell weight in a gymnasium. Pinocchio goes into the hospital room of the driver that ran into James and tears his face off, followed by eviscerating his organs and placing them into his chest cavity. He pins the dentist (Belinda Fenty) who tended James down and smashes her teeth out. Elsewhere, he bashes in the head of a girl and then electrocutes her in a pool and removes her eyeballs, while swinging over the banisters of stairs while grabbing onto another girl’s scalp and using his weight to rip it off.
Rhys Frake-Waterfield is a Scott Chambers associate and has appeared as a producer on more than thirty of his films. Frake-Waterfield made his directorial debut with The Area 51 Incident (2022) and went onto Demonic Christmas Tree (2022), Firenado (2023) and Sky Monster (2023), as well as Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey (2023) and Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey II (2024).
Trailer here