Just the Ticket #202: Bambi - The Reckoning

Article by Sean Wilkinson,

a.k.a. The Ticketmaster.

Just the Ticket takes things from the jungle to the forest this week as I dip my toes back into Rhys Frake-Waterfield's budding public domain horror franchise, the Twisted Childhood Universe, for a look at Bambi: The Reckoning. For quick access to this and other reviews in the franchise as they're published, you can click my TCU tag, or the following links to read my thoughts on the two Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood & Honey films.

• Just the Ticket #124: Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood & Honey
• Just the Ticket #188: Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood & Honey II

Directed by Dan Allen (the 2017 Unhinged remake, several short horror films, and a handful of other "four friends go to a place and/or do a thing and get killed" movies), Bambi: The Reckoning is a fairly basic "family gathering in a house in the woods" movie, but with the presence/killer/monster being a 'roided-out, zombified, Toxic Avenger version of a deer that we are supposed to assume from the title is Bambi (though the Milne Search montage from Blood & Honey II tells us the wooded town where the movie takes place—filmed on location in Wilding Wood in East Sussex—is called Bamdi).

It has the usual, jittery, twisted, children's book intro explaining how Bambi became a monster (for which the design and CGI by Boiling Point Media, Lumapix Creative Studios, and Solo VFX was impressive for this scale of production) before we are introduced to the most gaslighting movie mom of all time, Xana (Roxanne McKee, Dominion and Game Of Thrones), and her adorable but screen-addicted son, Benji (Tom Mulheron, The Last Vermeer). We know he's adorable because he confuses divorce with deportation, which means he's also qualified to move to Minneapolis and become an ICE agent. Benji's work-focused father, Simon (Alex Cooke, Blood Vessel) can't make it to dinner with the in-laws because of a plot-relevant workplace incident, and Xana spends most of the movie lying to Benji about it because that's her one character trait to make her unlikable, I guess. The aforementioned in-laws aren't specimens of human decency themselves, though, as they commit passive elder abuse against senile (or is she psychic‽) grandmother Mary (Nicola Wright, who was in Peter Pan's Neverland Nightmare as a different character) and their son Harrison (Joseph Greenwood) is a bullying, animal-abusing shitstain. And they're all completely oblivious to Xana and Benji arriving on foot, huffing and covered in dirt and blood, so when the mutated deer comes charging in (the lighting and atmosphere actually makes for a pretty effective jumpscare here) and starts literally wrecking house and goring and bisecting them (fun practical and visual effects, even if the closeup of Bambi trying to hoof a doorknob made me roll my eyes), they're totally unprepared and mostly deserve what's coming to them, especially Harrison getting lured into a beartrap and mauled by Mutant Thumper. I cheered that one and re-watched it twice.

Then there are the hunters that the movie keeps cutting back to, who seem to be following Bambi's trail to Xana and Benji's wrecked rideshare and then the house, later revealing that they were hired by Wibexr Pharmaceuticals (the company who dumped the Re-Agent-looking chemical that mutated the deer and the rabbits) as a cleanup crew, and that their boss is...Simon! I mean, of course it's Simon; how could it not be? This is a mid-budget British horror movie with a cast I can count on two hands and only one company is ever named, so it stands to reason. I wouldn't even be surprised if Wibexr had a genetics lab specializing in human-animal hybridization. Whatever the case, Simon's two goals are to protect his family (which he failed at miserably because over half of them are dead and the other half didn't listen to him for the sake of baiting the audience with fractured family clichés) and to use Bambi's fawn as bait to capture and kill him (which only kinda works because Bambi is killed, but Simon finds out what it's like to be Wayne Knight in Jurassic Park, and what it's like to be that rich family at the beginning of The Lost World, and what happens when you're human and you take a monster's baby...like Julianne Moore did in The Lost World). I appreciated the dual child-parent reunion near the end, but the movie just kind of approximated a happy ending (assholes dead, monster dead, mother and son together and alive) and stopped. I expected some post-credits action where Pooh shows up to revive Bambi with axolotl DNA or something, or at least for a killer zombie deer movie to get a little more wacky with its runtime, but the MCU-esque, "Bambi will return" promise at the end of the GoogleDocs-ass credits roll (and the thematic ambiguity of whether it refers to the deer or the fawn) were sufficient thinking points to leave the audience with. Bambi: The Reckoning should also be acknowledged for delivering exactly what it promises, succeeding in the execution of that basic vision, and not being an agonizing viewing experience.

C+

Peter Pan's Neverland Nightmare actually came out six months before Bambi: The Reckoning, but because I chose to review Neverland: Hook next week (thematic!), I scheduled this review first. So Stay Tuned for that, and please remember to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, leave a comment at the bottom of this post and any others you have opinions about, help out my ad revenue as you read because money doesn't grow on trees, and follow me on BlueSky, Tumblr, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest news on my content.

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Ticketmaster,

Out Of the Woods.