20 Recent Horror Movies WAY Better Than Expected

It's tough to expect much from The Twisted Childhood Universe - a fundamentally cynical franchise of IP-themed slasher movies that exist only because the characters featured have entered the public domain.

It all kicked off with 2023's wretched Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey, and though the sequel was a surprising improvement, it still wasn't what most would call a genuinely good film.

And so, few had high hopes for the wider expansion of the franchise with last year's Bambi: The Reckoning, especially as pulling off a CGI-filled creature feature on a shoestring budget is a sight more difficult than a pair of masked slasher flicks.

Now, is Bambi: The Reckoning a great movie? Absolutely not, but is it a laudably ambitious attempt to do something fun and interesting with a tired concept? Definitely.

For one, the CGI killer Bambi looks surprisingly good for a film that cost just £250,000, there are a number of memorable death scenes, and it's overall just more professionally put together than any previous film in the TCU.

As a result, Bambi: The Reckoning even managed to scrape a critically Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, Who the hell could've ever seen that coming?