‘Pinocchio: Unstrung’ Review: Killer Puppetry in a Killer Puppet Movie

British indie director Rhys Frake-Waterfield gained a measure of notoriety for his 2023 film “Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey,” at best an amusing sketch idea that could hardly support a feature-length horror movie, let alone a very slapdash sequel. But it wasn’t memorably bad enough to merit either cultists or a shelf full of Razzies, both of which it found: As a prankster on a shoestring budget, Frake-Waterfield has technical resourcefulness and even a bit of wit. Both are again in evidence on his latest, “Pinocchio: Unstrung,” though so are are clear shortfalls in storytelling and basic scare-mongering. Anyone who was tickled by an evil Pooh Bear may get a kick out of an evil Pinocchio, but the director’s so-called Twisted Childhood Universe remains a pretty old-hat idea, not mined here with any great daring.

Conceptually, a Pinocchio horror film is less of a lark than a Winnie-the-Pooh one, in large part because “Pinocchio,” in its original pre-Disney form, was already plenty macabre as a story. Though it too strayed pretty far from Carlo Collodi’s 19th-century novel, Guillermo del Toro’s Oscar-winning 2022 stop-motion version reclaimed some of that dark spirit with a Fascist Italy milieu, baroque flashes of violence and the vividly personified presence of Death throughout. It did not, however, feature the eponymous wooden marionette gleefully peeling the skin off people’s faces, so “Pinocchio: Unstrung” has its own USP.

What it does have in common with del Toro’s film is the craggy, splintery, roughly handmade design of Pinocchio himself, a far cry from the smoothly rounded cartoon child of many childhood imaginations — and something of a triumph for the film’s puppetry and animatronic departments, on whom the film is pleasingly reliant. (They’re also proudly showcased in behind-the-scenes footage that runs through the closing credits.) The gore effects here are, for the most part, similarly organic…