Bambi: The Reckoning. Bambi. The. Reckoning. That just sounds like a joke, something like that classic Bambi Meets Godzilla cartoon that I will definitely link here.
However much this sounds like it doesn’t exist, I can guarantee it does, as we’re deep into our Public Domain horror week! After barely surviving Alice in Terrorland, I was not looking forward to a movie that sounded even dumber, but let’s enter with an open mind and see what Bambi has in store for us.
The main plot begins with a woman and her son traveling to meet her estranged husband at his family’s woodland estate, where the rest of his family is already gathered. After encountering Bambi, who has been transformed into some kind of deer monster, on the road, the family, minus the husband, is reunited, and they try to escape the forest and figure out why Bambi is on a spree of Reckoning, and what connection this could have to a mysterious group of poachers seen in the forest.
Until I wrote that summary, I didn’t realize how much plot this movie has. There is actually a kind of intricate web of characters and how they relate to each other and the Bambi monster, which kind of surprised me given that this is set in the same universe as Winnie The Pooh: Blood & Honey. Unlike Blood & Honey though, the trajectory between the original story and this movie makes a bit more sense. Bambi is a deer, deer exist and are pretty strong, if one were to experience the death of its family and then become mutated, a reckoning could easily occur, making this a reasonably straightforward monster movie that doesn’t rely too much on gimmicky shock value beyond having ‘Bambi’ in the title.
As far as monster movies go, this one is surprisingly decent. The mom and son are a good duo of protagonists, they have realistic family issues and generally behave like people trying to get out of a terrible situation, rather than idiots doing dumb things so the plot can move forward. There are also plenty of idiot characters that are fodder for Bambi and the other mutated creatures of the forest, whose deaths are all suitably gory for this type of movie, without being completely over the top. I even kind of liked how the story progressed and wrapped up between the mother, her son, and her husband, it had a neat character arc for everyone involved and avoided a lot of unnecessary drama.
Obviously this isn’t a perfect movie, the acting is a bit all over the place, some performances are good, some are pretty meh, and a lot of the effects have varying levels of quality. And for all the backstory I had to describe, the story isn’t much beyond “people are trying to leave the forest”, which isn’t that interesting. If this sounds like its ending up in the middle somewhere, that’s because it is. I can pick out flaws but also highlight things it does correctly, and I have certainly seen a lot worse monster movies. Almost shockingly, Bambi: The Reckoning is a decent monster movie that may be the high point so far of the Blood & Honey cinematic universe.
