By David Dent
The fourth entry in British company Jagged Edge’s ‘Twisted Child Universe’ (TCU) sees another dark reimagining of a beloved children’s classic text. In this instance JE house director Dan Allen has plundered the 1923 novel ‘Bambi, A Life in the Woods’, written by Felix Salten and famously adapted, albeit in a modified form, for the big screen by Walt Disney in 1942.
TCU creator Rhys Frake-Waterfield, in response to criticisms that earlier Universe entries had been weak, promised to up his game; Bambi The Reckoning is the result. And compared with early JE productions, and indeed Allen’s previous output, BTR is definitely a step in the right direction.
Opening with an animated sequence which tells of the woods as being both a magical and dangerous place, we see a stag drinking from chemically contaminated water, the driver for Bambi’s murderous impulses. We meet mum Xana (Roxanne McKee), about to ferry her and young son Benji (Tom Mulheron) off to the relatives of absent dad Simon (Alex Cooke). The relatives are the usual feuding types, whose domestic squabbles move the movie along until mutated Bambi turns up, which to be fair doesn’t take long.
Most of the rest of the film pits the chemically altered deer against the local populace, with some baffling psychic bond existing between beast and Xana’s dementia ridden mother-in-law Mary (Nicola Wright). The setup may be familiar JE territory, and the Bambi references tangential at best, but if you don’t think about the silliness of the whole setup there’s a lot of fun (and gore) to be had, some better than average CGI and impressive nighttime photography by JE regular Vince Knight. The man behind this of course is the company’s head honcho Scott Chambers aka Jeffrey, who once again gets to lever in some Jurassic Park homages. The credits are littered with postproduction VFX crews and there’s a slickness at work here which all suggest a slightly higher budget than the usual fare.
Bambi: The Reckoning screened as part of Frightfest 2025.
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