Around five minutes into the Craig Rees (Whispers) directed and co-written Goldilocks and the Three Bears: Death and Porridge I was thinking it wasn't bad at all. Sadly that feeling didn't stay with me for long as this indie version of The Strangers was all bark and barely any bite.
A group of friends have travelled to a remote house in the middle of some woods for a getaway trip to celebrate the birthday of Kelly (Abigail Huxley). Unable to locate the key for the house they call the host only to discover that they had accidentally been given the wrong address. With it near to night time, the group decide to bizarrely break into the property. Their plan is to spend the night and then leave to travel to their actual intended location in the morning. Unknown to them, their actions have angered the actual inhabitants of the house - four psychos, three dressed as bears and one dressed up like Goldilocks (Olga Solo) who decide to teach the group a brutal lesson.
I thought the set-up of the killers dressed up as characters from a fairy tale was a cool one, and from the prologue sequence that showed the crazies I thought this would be a decent The Strangers type knock off. Unfortunately that wasn't the case at all. The first thing I noticed was how bad a lot of the acting was. It was so distracting with the stilted artificial way some of the characters spoke that I came to think that maybe all the dialogue had been dubbed in over the original dialogue. I don't think this was the case though, I think there were just a few dodgy actors mixed within the cast. The script is groan worthy at times, especially when the protagonists see fit to bring in dialogue from the namesake fairy tale and try and pass it off as coincidental. Examples include Kelly laying in bed saying the bed felt 'just right', and a breakfast scene where the characters are eating porridge, one complaining theirs was too hot and another saying theirs was too cold. It was at least brought into present day with Simon (Rees) mentioning the terrible war in Ukraine, and I thought both comedic character George (Jimmy Roberts) and Jas (Flex Singh) were the most interesting.
The film moved at a slow meandering pace, with it taking forever until anything really happens. It is thirty minutes before the horror begins, but it is around fifty minutes until the antagonists really make their appearance. The protagonists were super annoying, and I found it silly that they kept complaining about the lack of food and plates and bowls in the house, seeing as they had broken into a random persons home! With the group apparently having a fondness for practical jokes I began to assume that it would all turn out to be one large prank, but no, that sadly wasn't the case. There is weird pacing and strange character motivations. The film keeps switching from night to day and back again without any of the cast really doing anything to warrant that amount of time having passed, and characters keep vanishing for various reasons that never really made any sense.
The villains were a mixed bag, with Goldilocks and Daddy Bear (Robson Medler) at least looking the part. The former was the only bad guy who spoke, though she was very irritating. Daddy Bear had a cool design to him, and was the only one who felt like a genuine threat. All Baby Bear (Grace Darling Smith) and Mama Bear (Jack Berry) did was dance around, and their more cute and cuddly bear masks compared to Daddy's more horror based one did not look as good. I really don't know why they even bothered being in the movie. There were a few kills, some happening off camera and some on. Unfortunately, despite some nice ideas, the kills were let down by some awful looking special effects, such as a truly terrible looking CG explosion. There was one kill towards the later half that was admittedly a great one, helped with a practical special effect. That was the absolute highlight of the movie for me.
Throughout Goldilocks and The Three Bears there was a real sense of some bad directing. The pacing felt very off and there was a weird lack of peril even when the protagonists were being hunted and killed. The action picks up for the final twenty minutes, but by that point I was fighting falling asleep and just wishing for it all to be over.
SCORE:
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