I sat down for Pinocchio: Unstrung with my arms crossed, and my expectations parked at “public domain cash grab.” Five movies into a franchise built on lapsed copyrights, I figured I already knew the shape of the thing before the lights dropped. Then the puppet turned its head, and I uncrossed my arms so I could get a better grip on the seat.

This is the fifth entry in the Twisted Childhood Universe, the same sandbox that gave us the murderous Winnie the Pooh, and I have been loud about my doubts on the whole Poohniverse pitch since day one. A story does not become horror because you splashed blood on a nursery. Somebody has to actually build the nightmare. This one took something sweet off the shelf, sharpened it, and handed it back to me handle first.

Rhys Frake-Waterfield, the guy who started this whole franchise, wrote and directed. What he made is meaner, funnier, and a lot more competent than I was ready for.

The Puppet Is the Whole Argument

Let me get to the thing everyone will ask about. Yes. The puppet is terrifying.

Not “unsettling face on a poster” terrifying. In the room with you terrifying. This Pinocchio has weight. When he moves you feel the pine in him, the little hitch of a thing built to be adorable now being driven by something that very much is not. He takes up space. He throws a shadow that behaves like it is attached to a body. A lot of the dread is just watching him stand somewhere he should not be able to stand and knowing full well nobody painted him in after the fact.

That physical presence is the movie’s spine. When the kills come, and they come wet, they land because the object doing the killing has mass and texture and a wrongness you can almost smell. There is a difference between a monster you watch and a monster that seems to be sharing your oxygen. This is the second kind.

Robert Englund Is Not Just Decoration

Here is where I owe an apology. I assumed Robert Englund was a name on the poster and a paycheck in the credits. Slap Freddy Krueger on the one-sheet, sell some tickets, let the man phone in a growl. I have watched that trick a hundred times.

He voices the Cricket. Not a cuddly conscience on your shoulder telling you to be good. A wicked little thing whispering the boy toward slaughter, reframing every bad idea as the righteous one. Englund gives it this oily, delighted patience, and it turns the movie from a puppet swinging a blade into something with a nasty little pulse. The conscience is the corrupter here, which is a genuinely rotten idea, and Englund plays it like he has been waiting years for a part this gleefully cruel. He is having the time of his life and he drags you into it.

The Handmade Nightmare

Credit where it belongs. Todd Masters and his crew built Pinocchio as a full practical animatronic, and if the name rings a bell it should. This is the shop behind Slither and the creature work on Tales from the Crypt, plus the updated Chucky in the 2019 Child’s Play. That pedigree is all over the screen.

The animatronic does the heavy lifting, and the film is smart enough to let the camera sit still and trust it. Every twitch of the jaw, every too-slow tilt of the head, reads as a mechanical thing pretending to be alive, which is exactly the flavor of scary this material needs. The gore is practical and generous and it splatters with real consequence, the kind of red that makes the whole audience make the same noise at once.

Where digital work shows up, it stays in service of the handmade stuff instead of replacing it. Nothing here feels rendered. It feels carved, wired, and pointed at you. That choice is the difference between a movie you shrug off and a movie that found the warm soft part of being seven and drove a splinter straight into it.

Richard Brake Anchors the Cruelty

Richard Brake plays Geppetto, and he brings the exact weathered dread he brought to Barbarian and 31. His Geppetto is obsessive, grief-sick, and just human enough to make the whole thing hurt. He is the gravity the camp needs. Without a face like his selling the sorrow underneath, the blood would just be blood.

And that balance is the part I keep turning over. This should be a mess of tones. Instead the camp, the cruelty, and the honest scares take turns without stepping on each other. It is funny when it wants to be funny and genuinely upsetting the second it decides to stop kidding around. That is a hard trick and most of these public domain slashers fumble it. This one does not.

The Twisted Childhood Trap

So why does this version clear the bar when the concept could have been so cheap? Because it does not treat “what if childhood but murder” as the whole joke. That premise is a punchline, not a movie, and I have sat through the lazy versions.

Unstrung actually cares about the nostalgia it is desecrating. It knows the sting only works if the sweetness was real first, so it earns the warmth before it starts carving. This is a bedtime story that came back with receipts and a weapon. The wooden boy is basically a lawsuit filed against innocence, and innocence is not walking out of the courtroom. Somebody taught a fairy tale to bite, and it learned fast.

The film is not flawless. The human characters orbiting the puppet are thinner than they need to be, and a couple of them exist mostly to stand in a doorway until it is their turn. There is a stretch in the middle where the movie is clearly waiting for its next big set piece and lets the pace go slack. None of it sank me. When the puppet is on screen, and he usually is, I did not care about anything else. I just held the seat.

Verdict

I came in a skeptic and left annoyed at how well it worked on me. Pinocchio: Unstrung is gleefully mean, weirdly beautiful in its handmade ugliness, and scarier than a movie with this logline has any business being. It took my nostalgia, held it for ransom, and mailed it back to me a splinter at a time. I would pay it again.

It hits North American theaters on July 24. Four out of five. The cricket did nothing wrong, and that is the scariest part.