Bambi: The Reckoning Review
Dan Allen’s Bambi: The Reckoning is the most polished-looking entry yet in the Twisted Childhood/“Poohniverse” experiment—antlers sharp, textures upgraded, and the forest genuinely ominous. But once the movie starts talking—about grief, family, etc.—the chase slows to a trudge. Sure, you can see elements of the glow-up, but you can also feel the fun leaking out.
Bambi: The Reckoning (2025) | ITN and Jagged Edge Productions
A sharper creature in a messier universe
Allen’s Bambi: The Reckoning arrives as the latest entry in the so-called Twisted Childhood Universe, the cheeky horror brand built around public-domain icons turned slashers. It’s a small but notable craft step up for Jagged Edge: the redesigned, stag-from-hell Bambi is often convincing, the forest staging is clearer, and the practical/CG blend holds together better than in its grimy predecessors (especially an RV chase sequence).
The darkness of the night exteriors hides seams without smothering the image, and the creature’s silhouette—broad rack, burning eyes—has some presence. As a proof of concept for taking these meme-ready premises more seriously on a technical level, it sometimes works.
When the setup is the high point
As a premise, it’s undeniably pulpy: a mother (Roxanne McKee) and her son are hunted through the woods by a mutated, grief-crazed Bambi after a crash, the latest riff on “nature fights back.” That’s perfectly serviceable—simple, propulsive, genre-ready. The problem is what the film layers on top.
Where a lean survival thriller could thrive, Bambi: The Reckoning keeps adding familiar beats: a slow-burning broken-family backstory, whispers of corporate malfeasance, and a few episodic-esque detours designed mainly to queue up dispatchable side characters. The screenplay keeps stopping the chase to explore character motivations we never feel, and the longer it talks, the flatter the people become. The bare-bones story—mom, kid, killer deer—ends up more satisfying than the cluttered attempt to deepen it. That being said, the film’s final sequence digs into this dynamic and offers slight improvement—it’s just too late.
Camp without Any spark
This brand works best when it leans into absurdity; you come for the audacity and stay if the movie understands its own joke. Bambi: The Reckoning never quite finds that gear (unlike Blood and Honey 2). The tone is somber, even self-serious, with a straight-faced treatment of family melodrama that douses the potential for gonzo fun.
Set-pieces occasionally pop—a zombie-mutated deer silhouette materializing between trees, a charge through head-high brush—but they’re surrounded by boilerplate staging and dialogue that seems engineered to shuttle us to the next kill rather than reveal anything about the people in danger. Even the clichés you might embrace for camp value are played so earnestly they turn inert instead of gleefully trashy. If you’re billing “mutant Bambi on a rampage,” you can’t spend the majority of your story working on (unsuccessfully) developing deep characters.
The craft glow-up can't carry the movie
To be fair, the improvements are real. The creature design is superior to the stitched-mask novelty of earlier one-offs, the action geography is less muddy, and the CGI—while still constrained—doesn’t yank you out of the moment as often. You can feel the team taking bigger swings and occasionally landing them. But better VFX can’t compensate for thinly sketched characters, stop-start pacing, and a script that mistakes busyness for momentum. By the time the film ends up in its finale, the runtime has crowded out the surprise and the giddy shock that this concept needs to work.
As a franchise play, it’s easy to see why this exists: it broadens the Twisted Childhood bench and tees up future crossovers while proving the team can push beyond meme-quality visuals. As a standalone watch, though, it’s a reminder that competence is not the same as personality. The movie looks better than you expect; it just never feels better. If the Poohniverse is going to become more than a headline factory, it needs writers willing to build characters you’d follow into the trees—and filmmakers willing to let the campy premise breathe instead of smothering it under serious-face monologues. Until then, this is a curious artifact: a better-made bad movie that’s not quite bad in the right way.
Score: 4.5/10
Bambi: The Reckoning brings sharper creature work to the ‘Poohniverse’, but the fun gets lost in a thicket of tropes and flat characters.
