There isn’t a generation of Disney kids alive that weren’t introduced to fictional heartbreak through Bambi. Before traumatized tykes watched Mufasa get trampled by that stampede in The Lion King, it was that poor deer’s mother’s death at the hands of a hunter that first jolted them into discovering their own mortality.
But what would happen if young Bambi got the chance to seek revenge on the a--hole who shot his mom? What if he traded impressionist woodlands and hand-sketched flower fields for a starring role as the big bad of an unabashedly C-tier creature feature? You don’t need to wonder any longer—Bambi: The Reckoning is in theaters now.
Dan Allen’s film is actually the fourth in the so-called “Twisted Childhood Universe,” a series of gory reimagingings of beloved children’s characters (yes, Rhys Frake-Waterfield of Winnie The Pooh: Blood and Honey fame wrote this, too).
Like Blood and Honey, ITN Studios simply waited for Bambi’s original source text—Felix Salten’s 1932 book Bambi, A Life in the Woods—to enter public domain so they could have their schlocky fun, Disney be damned. The general public will probably always remember Bambi as a wide-eyed, merchandise-able little fawn, but they’re entitled to make him a flesh-eating mutant, damn it!
That outlandish premise alone makes Bambi: The Reckoning the perfect thing to throw on while under some kind of influence in a friend’s basement. The trouble is, Allen and Frake-Waterfield take the entire thing a degree too seriously. Yes, there are campy kills to be had, but the film’s half-hearted attempts to sandwich dull familial drama in between make it hard to enjoy its goofiness, full-stop.
In case you are somehow the one adult who tuned in to a killer deer movie with no knowledge of the famous IP it comes from, Bambi: The Reckoning kicks things off with a handy animated prologue.
“Sometimes, no matter how hard you try to shield yourself and your family from the dangers of the world, life has other ideas,” a kindly narrator reminds us as cobbled-together images of an orphaned young deer starting his own family take shape.
It’s all reminiscent of a standard fairytale, where thorny coming-of-age truths typically come wrapped in spooky supernatural subtext. In this case, Bambi’s tragic study of a young animal’s life being upended by humans’ encroachment becomes supernatural after his family are killed in a carwreck. The grieving deer decides to take a sip of the nefarious chemical that local corporation Wilberx are seeding into the ground, and bam! Bambi is transformed into a fanged, bloodthirsty monster who will stop at nothing to attack his prey.
That modicum of thoughtful storytelling goes out the window when Bambi: The Reckoning’s human characters enter the scene. Like Bambi, young Benji is just trying to make it through the woods with his single mother, Xana (Roxanne McKee) while his deadbeat dad, Simon (Alex Cooke), is off doing who knows what. But on their way to visit Simon’s family, the mother-son duo’s taxi is attacked by the mutant deer of the hour.
It doesn’t help that Bambi seems to have a mysterious connection to Simon’s mother Mary (Nicola Wright), who has suddenly forgotten her own grandson but has enough lucidity to whisper the creature’s name and scribble hasty portraits of him in the dark. There’s an assortment of cartoonishly rude in-laws around, but they’re such obvious cannon fodder that they only get a few snippy lines in before their demises.
In staging Bambi: The Reckoning’s handful of setpieces, Allen is strangely in conversation with a tradition of unsuccessful Jurassic Park and Jurassic World directors before him. He pays painstaking, lower-budget homage to the film franchise, whether in an early moment in which characters hide from their animal attacker’s snapping jaws in an overturned car, or a later scene where Xana wields a flare gun a la Bryce Dallas Howard in Jurassic World.
It’s a fun enough approach to a film whose premise reads like Michael Crichton on several lines of cocaine, which makes its anticlimactic deaths all the more perplexing—apart from a killer bunnies sequence that cheekily pays homage to Bambi’s famous pal.
The dim gray color grading hanging over Bambi: The Reckoning’s nighttime goes a long way to obscure the less convincing elements of Bambi’s character design. However, it might also explain why his kills are so abrupt and bloodless in a movie that should be dripping in red corn syrup.
If Allen and co took things a little less seriously and leaned into camp, it might be more fun to enjoy Bambi’s Annihilation-esque protruding skeleton or the bizarre entertainment of watching a character who’s been ripped in half continue breathing. But by choosing to center so much of the film’s drama on Benji and Xana’s strained relationship with Simon, Bambi: The Reckoning shoots itself in the foot. Next time, might I suggest a hot fox Robin Hood serial killer romp instead?
