Crew
Director/Screenplay/Producer – Craig Rees, Photography – Toson Chan, Music – Sarah Su, Visual Effects – Silver Edge Studios (Supervisor – Max Murray), Special Effects – Ngawang (Nova) Lektso, Makeup Effects – Grace Darling Smith, Production Design – Crispin R. Spinks. Production Company – Rees Dragon Productions.
Cast
Abigail Huxley (Kelly), Jimmy Roberts (George), Craig Rees (Simon), Flex Singh (Jas), Olga Solo (Goldilocks), Robson Medler (Daddy Bear), Jack Berry (Mama Bear), Grace Darling Smith (Baby Bear), Sarah Keane (Nicole), Susan Franks (Jamie), Julian Amos (Norman), Mai Crowley (Tortured Teenager)
Plot
A group of friends head off to a rented house for the weekend. They arrive at the house in the woods only to be informed that they have been given the wrong address. They force open a door and settle in to spend the night. They find it odd that the place has only plates and settings for four people. In the morning, they find their car missing. The house is then surrounded by four people wearing masks as Goldilocks and the Three Bears who proceeds to pursue, torture and kill the group.
Ever since the success of Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey (2023), we have had a spate of films that savagely deconstruct fairytales and other favourite childhood stories as horror films. These have included several Mickey Mouse and Popeye horror films, as well as the likes of Mary Had a Little Lamb (2023), Three Blind Mice (2023), Bambi the Reckoning (2025), Hook (2025), Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare (2025) and Pinocchio Unstrung (2026), among others.
Goldilocks and the Three Bears: Death & Porridge was the second film for British director Craig Rees who had previously made Annabellum: The Curse of Salem (2019), as well as produced Violence (2015) and Whispers (2015). Before that, Rees has a number of credits as an actor. He can be spotted on screen here as the older (grey-haired) member of the group called Simon.
Most of these other childhood horror stories do not much more than rob the basics of other well-known horror films and mash them up characters from children’s stories. The original Goldilocks published in 1837 has an old woman (which was changed to a girl in later versions) enter the house of three bears where she tries out their porridge and beds, before the bears return home. Here what we essentially get is a version of the home invasion film The Strangers (2008) but where the masked home invaders happen to be wearing masks and costumes that resemble Goldilocks and the Three Bears.
There is a house that is laid out for the group as they turn up and scenes where they find porridge waiting for them, along with lines about “not too hot … not too cold … just right.” But these feel awkwardly grafted on ie. the masked figures could play out in a story of their own without the need to add the scenes that take place in the house. These preliminary scenes are not that interesting – the cast often seem to be sitting around trying to figure out what to do with the dialogue. These sections are essentially just a waiting period – it is half the film over before anything starts to happen.
The scenes with Goldilocks and the Three Bears pursuing and killing the rest of the cast slip into the more routine simply because they are copying a type of film that has been done dozens of times before. It is all a standard variant on The Strangers, which has been imitated by a surprising number of other films. Olga Solo’s Goldilocks is another cinematic cliché figure of the girl in the mini-skirt and kewpie doll face conducting sadistic despatches.
Trailer here