British independent director Rhys Frake-Waterfield gained some notoriety for his 2023 film “Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey,” at best a fun sketch idea that could hardly support a full-length horror film, much less a very botched sequel. But it wasn’t bad enough to merit cultists or a rack full of Razzies, both of which he found: As a prankster on a shoestring budget, Frake-Waterfield has technical genius and even a bit of wit. Both are evident again in his latest book, “Pinocchio: Unstrung,” although so are clear deficiencies in storytelling and basic scaremongering. Anyone who has been tickled by an evil Pooh Bear can enjoy an evil Pinocchio, but the director’s so-called Twisted Children’s Universe is still a rather dated idea, not one that has been mined with any great boldness here.

Conceptually, a Pinocchio horror movie is less fun than a Winnie-the-Pooh one, largely because “Pinocchio,” in its original pre-Disney form, was already a pretty macabre story. Although it also strayed quite far from Carlo Collodi’s 19th-century novel, Guillermo del Toro’s Oscar-winning 2022 stop-motion version recaptured some of that dark spirit with a setting of fascist Italy, baroque flashes of violence, and the vividly personified presence of Death throughout. However, it didn’t feature the eponymous wooden puppet gleefully peeling skin off people’s faces, so “Pinocchio: Unstringing” gets its own USP.

What it does have in common with del Toro’s film is the craggy, splintered, crudely crafted design of Pinocchio himself, a far cry from the smoothly rounded cartoon child of many childhood imaginings, and something of a triumph for the film’s puppet and animatronics departments, upon whom the film is pleasantly dependent. (They are also proudly displayed in behind-the-scenes footage that runs through the end credits.) The gore here is, for the most part, equally organic and old-school: “Pinocchio: Unstringing” is never especially scary, and even its jump scares are strangely muffled, but it’s abundantly gross and creepy in all the ways a cheap and cheerful slasher should be.

There is more visual initiative here than in “Blood and Honey,” although it begins, like that film, with a simply animated prologue. Designed to evoke shadow theater, it lays out the slim story of how Geppetto – a wealthy British inventor in this contemporary telling, more mad scientist than humble carpenter, and played by “Game of Thrones” alum Richard Brake – came to create the wooden boy in a deliberate effort to create artificial life. When his grandson James (Cameron Bell) is orphaned after a car accident, he accepts another surrogate child, but keeps the two children separated in his spooky Gothic mansion, until Pinocchio’s restless curiosity gets the better of him.

Although James is initially frightened by this talking log, it isn’t long before the two bond as brothers, and James, against Geppetto’s firm orders that Pinocchio never leave the house, smuggles his new friend to school in his backpack. There, Pinocchio witnesses James being bullied by his classmates and his vengeful instincts kick in. (He also witnesses James’ dental appointment after school, and similarly sees red: suffice to say, the puppet’s sense of right and wrong needs some adjustment.) he collects the human organs that he believes will turn him into one of them. (The fact that Geppetto didn’t give him manhood has not escaped his attention.) The most inventive death here, set in a school gym, causing death on a treadmill and dropping weights, is also the least motivated, but never mind.

Sharper, nastier jokes would make up for the sloppier writing here, as would a little more pep in the performances, although it’s fun to hear Robert Englund appear as a particularly cursed (and unnamed) incarnation of Jiminy Cricket. Meanwhile, the film’s tactile, rudimentary visual rewards are sometimes let down by a muddy sound mix. “Pinocchio: Unstringing” is then an exercise in twists and turns, but it also shows Frake-Waterfield settling into a style and ethos as a filmmaker: His provocations may be ridiculous, but here they feel more forceful and less calculated to achieve viral impact than in his previous work. As B-horror authors say, he may still be a real kid.