Kevin Tenney’s killer puppet movie hit shelves at exactly the wrong time. Released on Home Video in September of ’97, it landed just weeks after Scream hit Blockbuster shelves and completely reset the horror trends.
But here’s poor Pinocchio’s Revenge (1996), sat in the horror section dressed up like a Child’s Play knockoff, with VHS box art promising evil puppet mayhem – when it’s actually closer to The Bad Seed with a bit more wood grain.
The marketing killed this one dead. The ads toyed around with the Chucky’s formula, but what renters got was a domestic psychological thriller about a defense attorney (Rosalind Allen) whose daughter might be disturbed, might be possessed, or might just be processing trauma in all the wrong ways. The puppet barely moves. Most of the violence happens off-screen and can appear almost circumstantial. Tenney was making a movie about parental guilt and projection – but the distributor needed something that looked like it belonged next to Dolly Dearest in the Vidmark catalogue.
There’s real ambition here – Tenney’s trying to thread psychological horror through what everyone expected would be schlock. Brittany Alyse Smith, playing the daughter, gives one of those genuinely unnerving child performances that makes you uncomfortable for reasons you can’t articulate. She’s not doing creepy-kid theatrics. She’s just… off. In that way that makes adults in the room exchange worried glances.
The film belongs to that specific sub-genre about dangerous children, like The Good Son or Mikey. These weren’t fun midnight movies filled with stabby one liners. If you’re not in the right mood, they can leave you just feeling weird about family dynamics – as opposed to, you know, scared. Pinocchio’s Revenge could have gone down as a compelling Psycho twist, but its packaging put audiences in the wrong frame of mind, and no O. Henry ending was ever going to satisfy.
By the time Scream made horror self-aware – and with Bride of Chucky going full gonzo a few years later – there was little room left for this kind of ambiguous psychological slow burn dressed in puppet clothes. It looked like a schlocky relic and ended up in discount bins before anyone had a chance to figure out what it was actually trying to do. Thankfully, I love schlocky relics – and this, along with Tenney’s other films like Witchboard and Night of the Demons, became an instant favourite.
File it closer to PIN or The Pit, and suddenly that puppet makes a lot more sense. -Pop