A workshop, a talking cricket with bad intentions, and a wooden boy who decides that becoming real is a matter of carpentry performed on flesh. Rhys Frake-Waterfield wrote and directed this British independent slasher, the fifth entry in the Twisted Childhood Universe, the series that drags public-domain nursery characters into low-budget horror.

The frame comes from Carlo Collodi's 1883 novel [[work:le-avventure-di-pinocchio]], with the moral instruction stripped out. Geppetto builds the puppet, the cricket whispers at his ear, and Pinocchio sets out to match his brother James piece by piece. Robert Englund and Richard Brake head the cast, two faces horror audiences have followed for decades, alongside Jude Evan Lloyd, Cameron Bell, Jessica Balmer and Jack Art Gray.

Little else about the film sits on the record yet beyond that premise, the cast list and the shared universe it belongs to. Go in knowing what the TCU trades in: a familiar storybook silhouette, an unpleasant redesign of it, and a slasher structure underneath. Fans of the earlier instalments will know whether that bargain suits them.