Crew
Director – Jason Arber, Screenplay – Harry Boxley, Producers – Rhys Frake-Waterfield & Scott Jeffrey, Photography – Vince Knight, Music – Stuart Cowan, Visual Effects – Akash Singh & Phantom Limb Ltd, Makeup Effects – Jessica Martin. Production Company – Dark Abyss Productions.
Cast
May Kelly (Carla), Christine Anne Nyland (Mary), Gillian Broderick (Mona), Danielle Scott (Liz), Harry Boxley (Ray), Rob Kirtley (Matt), Gaston Alexander (Lamb), Charlie Esquer (Shelley), Lila Lasso (Joan), Mark Sears (Pete)
Plot
Carla, the host of the true crime radio series Carla’s Cold Cases, faces the termination of her show if she cannot do something that improves ratings. Carla comes up with the idea of investigating a series of missing persons in the Washington State area. She and her team travel there and begin searching but become lost in the forest. They arrive at a farmhouse and are welcomed in by the middle-aged Mary who lives there. In search of her story, Carla begins digging into Mary’s life. Mary then introduces them to her son, her Lamb, a hulking figure with the head of a lamb who kills to protect his mother.
Scott Chambers, often billed as Scott Jeffrey but also known under a host of pseudonyms, is a prolific British producer and frequently director. He has produced over a hundred films since 2017. Quite a sensation was created with the Chambers produced Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey (2023), his greatest success to date, where Chambers and director Rhys Frake-Waterfield took a beloved children’s character that had just entered public domain and delivered a brutal and nasty horror version. The film was a surprising success and has seen Chambers and associates making a host of other horror versions of children’s stories and fairytales with the likes of Three Blind Mice (2023), Cinderella’s Curse (2024), Goldilocks and the Three Bears: Death & Porridge (2024), Bambi: The Reckoning (2025), Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare (2025) and Pinocchio Unstrung (2026). Unlike the other imitators that have rushed to join the bandwagon, Chambers/Jeffrey and associates have been producing horror films based on children’s story/nursery rhyme/fairytale characters for some time before this – they have an ongoing Tooth Fairy, Humpty Dumpty, Jack Frost and Jack and Jill series, which are all onto multiple sequels by now.
Mary Had a Little Lamb was a rhyme written by Sarah Josepha Hale in 1830. Most of you are probably familiar with the first verse
Mary had a little lamb
Its fleece was white as snow
And everywhere that Mary went
The lamb was sure to go.
The other three verses go on to detail the amusement of the lamb that followed Mary to school and it refusing to go away after being turned out by the teacher (a story apparently based on a girl in a class that Hale used to teach who had a lamb follow her to school). That is about the sum of rhyme. A sweet little ditty, about as innocent as it gets. There have been numerous versions and parodies – Paul McCartney even recorded a song based on it in the 1970s.
It does however leave you wondering how on Earth Jeffrey/Chambers and associates are going to spin such a sweetly innocent piece as a horror story. I was scratching my head, thinking of something akin to the fine Icelandic film Lamb (2021). Mary Had a Little Lamb has the same idea as Lamb of making Mary’s lamb into a Human-Animal Hybrid of sorts – although now the young girl is rewritten as a middle-aged woman and Lamb is her devoted son who just happens to have a hulking body and a sheep’s head. There is no real explanation of how Lamb ends up with a lamb’s head.
The plot of the group of the people from the radio station who head into the countryside in search of a story is very similar to the one in Jeffrey’s Spider in the Attic (2021). Once Lamb is unveiled, the plot becomes fairly much a copy of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) with the group of interlopers being pursued by the hulking dim-witted son of a backwoods family. If that wasn’t evident then the final scene where May Kelly makes a getaway is almost a complete copy of Marilyn Burns’ escape in Texas Chain Saw.
The makeup job on Lamb makes him into quite a sinister creation. Unlike the Winnie-the-Pooh and other films, director Jason Arber soft pedals the horror element – there is not the pushing of the splatter and gore envelope to extremes that we had in those films. In fact, it seems that Arber suffers from an overall tameness when it comes to the horror element.
For some reason, Mary Had a Little Lamb is supposedly set in the US – as witness the reference to journeying to Washington State. May Kelly maintains an American accent and the others occasionally remember to but most don’t even bother or forget halfway through.
Trailer here