Bambi in the public domain: A smart and bloody take on a childhood favourite

The Advertiser

2 days ago

There's been an exciting trend in low-budget horror movies recently when iconic intellectual property, usually the ones associated with sweetness, hits that magic number where it enters into the public domain.
Like the 2023 film Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey, where Christopher Robin has neglected his animal friends after leaving for college and so they go on a killing rampage.
These twisted Winnie films - there's been a bunch of spin-offs and also-rans in the past two years - arrived on the scene just as AA Milne's original book, published in 1926, passed the 95-year mark required for the US public domain.
The juggernaut that is Disney couldn't stop enterprising filmmakers jumping on this adaptation bandwagon when Steamboat Willie, the first on-screen appearance of Mickey Mouse, entered public domain in 2014, with recent horror films like Mickey's Slayhouse and Mouseboat Massacre hitting - well, they're not hitting cinemas, they're mostly appearing on horror streaming services like Shudder.
Even my childhood favourite TV show characters The Banana Splits went on a malfunctioning animatronic killing spree in 2019's The Banana Splits Movie.
Bambi: The Reckoning takes, yes, your sweet childhood memory, though for legal reasons, it draws from author Felix Salten's 1923 novel Bambi: A Life in the Woods, and not the Disney adaptation that they still very much hold all rights for.
Director Dan Allen starts the film with a rustic animation that certainly nods towards the Disney drawings, showing over the title credits a young fawn losing his mother and growing up into a giant buck.
Except this deer, with his enormous antlers, lives in a woods being poisoned by men dumping green carcinogens in the water, the same men running over the buck and his mate with their trucks as they leave.
We'll come back to that buck in a moment, but in Rhys Warrington's screenplay, we also have a young mum caring for her child.
It is Xana (Roxanne McKee), mum to the bookish Benji (Tom Mulheron), who has just been let down once again by Benji's dad Simon (Alex Cooke), who had promised to take his son to a weekend with Simon's relatives in the country.
Rather than disappointing her son, Xana packs Benji into a taxi and head off into the deep forrest home that grandmother Mary (Nicola Wright) lives in.
It seems that Simon isn't the only disappointment in the family, as granny's home is full of Benji's awful relatives, like his obnoxious cousin Harrison (Joseph Greenwood) and Harrison's uncaring step-mother Harriet (Samira Mighty).
But, as in all good fairy tales, the taxi ride to Granny's house is interrupted, not by a wolf, but by an enormous set of antlers smashing into the taxi head-on.
The taxi driver is killed as the giant deer, feral with razor sharp teeth that drip blood, stomps the car's cabin, and Xana and Benji escape, running to Granny's house.
But Granny has dementia and in her vague moments, seems to be psychically linked to the deer, and it turns out there's a strong family link to the beast and the reason it is haunting the woods and the humans, any humans, it sees as being destroyers.
Dan Allen and Rhys Warrington's film is fun, if you like horror, but it's not the tongue-in-cheek horror that usually hits the multiplex cinemas.
Bambi doesn't throw off witty one-liners as he despatches his prey, it is kill-and-move-on.
The film's technical team is a small crew, the end credits were mercifully short, but they achieve good believable work with their CGI, keeping their scenes dark, only revealing the horror creatures when they need to.
Perhaps the small tech crew and judicious withholding is the secret to good CGI, I thought as I recalled how many thousands of names were in the technical credits to the second Wonder Woman or The Flash movies, and remember how butchered and rushed those film's CGI looked.
There's been an exciting trend in low-budget horror movies recently when iconic intellectual property, usually the ones associated with sweetness, hits that magic number where it enters into the public domain.
Like the 2023 film Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey, where Christopher Robin has neglected his animal friends after leaving for college and so they go on a killing rampage.
These twisted Winnie films - there's been a bunch of spin-offs and also-rans in the past two years - arrived on the scene just as AA Milne's original book, published in 1926, passed the 95-year mark required for the US public domain.
The juggernaut that is Disney couldn't stop enterprising filmmakers jumping on this adaptation bandwagon when Steamboat Willie, the first on-screen appearance of Mickey Mouse, entered public domain in 2014, with recent horror films like Mickey's Slayhouse and Mouseboat Massacre hitting - well, they're not hitting cinemas, they're mostly appearing on horror streaming services like Shudder.
Even my childhood favourite TV show characters The Banana Splits went on a malfunctioning animatronic killing spree in 2019's The Banana Splits Movie.
Bambi: The Reckoning takes, yes, your sweet childhood memory, though for legal reasons, it draws from author Felix Salten's 1923 novel Bambi: A Life in the Woods, and not the Disney adaptation that they still very much hold all rights for.
Director Dan Allen starts the film with a rustic animation that certainly nods towards the Disney drawings, showing over the title credits a young fawn losing his mother and growing up into a giant buck.
Except this deer, with his enormous antlers, lives in a woods being poisoned by men dumping green carcinogens in the water, the same men running over the buck and his mate with their trucks as they leave.
We'll come back to that buck in a moment, but in Rhys Warrington's screenplay, we also have a young mum caring for her child.
It is Xana (Roxanne McKee), mum to the bookish Benji (Tom Mulheron), who has just been let down once again by Benji's dad Simon (Alex Cooke), who had promised to take his son to a weekend with Simon's relatives in the country.
Rather than disappointing her son, Xana packs Benji into a taxi and head off into the deep forrest home that grandmother Mary (Nicola Wright) lives in.
It seems that Simon isn't the only disappointment in the family, as granny's home is full of Benji's awful relatives, like his obnoxious cousin Harrison (Joseph Greenwood) and Harrison's uncaring step-mother Harriet (Samira Mighty).
But, as in all good fairy tales, the taxi ride to Granny's house is interrupted, not by a wolf, but by an enormous set of antlers smashing into the taxi head-on.
The taxi driver is killed as the giant deer, feral with razor sharp teeth that drip blood, stomps the car's cabin, and Xana and Benji escape, running to Granny's house.
But Granny has dementia and in her vague moments, seems to be psychically linked to the deer, and it turns out there's a strong family link to the beast and the reason it is haunting the woods and the humans, any humans, it sees as being destroyers.
Dan Allen and Rhys Warrington's film is fun, if you like horror, but it's not the tongue-in-cheek horror that usually hits the multiplex cinemas.
Bambi doesn't throw off witty one-liners as he despatches his prey, it is kill-and-move-on.
The film's technical team is a small crew, the end credits were mercifully short, but they achieve good believable work with their CGI, keeping their scenes dark, only revealing the horror creatures when they need to.
Perhaps the small tech crew and judicious withholding is the secret to good CGI, I thought as I recalled how many thousands of names were in the technical credits to the second Wonder Woman or The Flash movies, and remember how butchered and rushed those film's CGI looked.
There's been an exciting trend in low-budget horror movies recently when iconic intellectual property, usually the ones associated with sweetness, hits that magic number where it enters into the public domain.
Like the 2023 film Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey, where Christopher Robin has neglected his animal friends after leaving for college and so they go on a killing rampage.
These twisted Winnie films - there's been a bunch of spin-offs and also-rans in the past two years - arrived on the scene just as AA Milne's original book, published in 1926, passed the 95-year mark required for the US public domain.
The juggernaut that is Disney couldn't stop enterprising filmmakers jumping on this adaptation bandwagon when Steamboat Willie, the first on-screen appearance of Mickey Mouse, entered public domain in 2014, with recent horror films like Mickey's Slayhouse and Mouseboat Massacre hitting - well, they're not hitting cinemas, they're mostly appearing on horror streaming services like Shudder.
Even my childhood favourite TV show characters The Banana Splits went on a malfunctioning animatronic killing spree in 2019's The Banana Splits Movie.
Bambi: The Reckoning takes, yes, your sweet childhood memory, though for legal reasons, it draws from author Felix Salten's 1923 novel Bambi: A Life in the Woods, and not the Disney adaptation that they still very much hold all rights for.
Director Dan Allen starts the film with a rustic animation that certainly nods towards the Disney drawings, showing over the title credits a young fawn losing his mother and growing up into a giant buck.
Except this deer, with his enormous antlers, lives in a woods being poisoned by men dumping green carcinogens in the water, the same men running over the buck and his mate with their trucks as they leave.
We'll come back to that buck in a moment, but in Rhys Warrington's screenplay, we also have a young mum caring for her child.
It is Xana (Roxanne McKee), mum to the bookish Benji (Tom Mulheron), who has just been let down once again by Benji's dad Simon (Alex Cooke), who had promised to take his son to a weekend with Simon's relatives in the country.
Rather than disappointing her son, Xana packs Benji into a taxi and head off into the deep forrest home that grandmother Mary (Nicola Wright) lives in.
It seems that Simon isn't the only disappointment in the family, as granny's home is full of Benji's awful relatives, like his obnoxious cousin Harrison (Joseph Greenwood) and Harrison's uncaring step-mother Harriet (Samira Mighty).
But, as in all good fairy tales, the taxi ride to Granny's house is interrupted, not by a wolf, but by an enormous set of antlers smashing into the taxi head-on.
The taxi driver is killed as the giant deer, feral with razor sharp teeth that drip blood, stomps the car's cabin, and Xana and Benji escape, running to Granny's house.
But Granny has dementia and in her vague moments, seems to be psychically linked to the deer, and it turns out there's a strong family link to the beast and the reason it is haunting the woods and the humans, any humans, it sees as being destroyers.
Dan Allen and Rhys Warrington's film is fun, if you like horror, but it's not the tongue-in-cheek horror that usually hits the multiplex cinemas.
Bambi doesn't throw off witty one-liners as he despatches his prey, it is kill-and-move-on.
The film's technical team is a small crew, the end credits were mercifully short, but they achieve good believable work with their CGI, keeping their scenes dark, only revealing the horror creatures when they need to.
Perhaps the small tech crew and judicious withholding is the secret to good CGI, I thought as I recalled how many thousands of names were in the technical credits to the second Wonder Woman or The Flash movies, and remember how butchered and rushed those film's CGI looked.
There's been an exciting trend in low-budget horror movies recently when iconic intellectual property, usually the ones associated with sweetness, hits that magic number where it enters into the public domain.
Like the 2023 film Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey, where Christopher Robin has neglected his animal friends after leaving for college and so they go on a killing rampage.
These twisted Winnie films - there's been a bunch of spin-offs and also-rans in the past two years - arrived on the scene just as AA Milne's original book, published in 1926, passed the 95-year mark required for the US public domain.
The juggernaut that is Disney couldn't stop enterprising filmmakers jumping on this adaptation bandwagon when Steamboat Willie, the first on-screen appearance of Mickey Mouse, entered public domain in 2014, with recent horror films like Mickey's Slayhouse and Mouseboat Massacre hitting - well, they're not hitting cinemas, they're mostly appearing on horror streaming services like Shudder.
Even my childhood favourite TV show characters The Banana Splits went on a malfunctioning animatronic killing spree in 2019's The Banana Splits Movie.
Bambi: The Reckoning takes, yes, your sweet childhood memory, though for legal reasons, it draws from author Felix Salten's 1923 novel Bambi: A Life in the Woods, and not the Disney adaptation that they still very much hold all rights for.
Director Dan Allen starts the film with a rustic animation that certainly nods towards the Disney drawings, showing over the title credits a young fawn losing his mother and growing up into a giant buck.
Except this deer, with his enormous antlers, lives in a woods being poisoned by men dumping green carcinogens in the water, the same men running over the buck and his mate with their trucks as they leave.
We'll come back to that buck in a moment, but in Rhys Warrington's screenplay, we also have a young mum caring for her child.
It is Xana (Roxanne McKee), mum to the bookish Benji (Tom Mulheron), who has just been let down once again by Benji's dad Simon (Alex Cooke), who had promised to take his son to a weekend with Simon's relatives in the country.
Rather than disappointing her son, Xana packs Benji into a taxi and head off into the deep forrest home that grandmother Mary (Nicola Wright) lives in.
It seems that Simon isn't the only disappointment in the family, as granny's home is full of Benji's awful relatives, like his obnoxious cousin Harrison (Joseph Greenwood) and Harrison's uncaring step-mother Harriet (Samira Mighty).
But, as in all good fairy tales, the taxi ride to Granny's house is interrupted, not by a wolf, but by an enormous set of antlers smashing into the taxi head-on.
The taxi driver is killed as the giant deer, feral with razor sharp teeth that drip blood, stomps the car's cabin, and Xana and Benji escape, running to Granny's house.
But Granny has dementia and in her vague moments, seems to be psychically linked to the deer, and it turns out there's a strong family link to the beast and the reason it is haunting the woods and the humans, any humans, it sees as being destroyers.
Dan Allen and Rhys Warrington's film is fun, if you like horror, but it's not the tongue-in-cheek horror that usually hits the multiplex cinemas.
Bambi doesn't throw off witty one-liners as he despatches his prey, it is kill-and-move-on.
The film's technical team is a small crew, the end credits were mercifully short, but they achieve good believable work with their CGI, keeping their scenes dark, only revealing the horror creatures when they need to.
Perhaps the small tech crew and judicious withholding is the secret to good CGI, I thought as I recalled how many thousands of names were in the technical credits to the second Wonder Woman or The Flash movies, and remember how butchered and rushed those film's CGI looked.