I didn’t watch this movie expecting it to be good, I watched it expecting it to be hilariously bad. And it wasn’t… it was just your average everyday level of bad. It wasn’t this train-wreck of hilarity, it was just a mediocre tale told without heart or appreciable talent. Not so bad its good like you get when you hear someone made an amateur hour Pinocchio movie starring the voice of Pauley Shore.

Yeah, this movie is junk but it’s just flat, boring old junk. If you are the kind of person who revels in cheesy shlock, this movie will not satisfy.

The flick is more-or-less a retelling of Pinocchio as a reminder that the idea of public domain has consequences. Geppetto makes a wooden boy, a fairy animates him. He wants to see the world and settles on the local circus… with his father figure, a horse with the voice of John Heder (Napoleon Dynamite). The circus is run by a trio of crooks, there’s a police detective on the case, and so on and on and on.

The promise of Pauley Shore doing hilarious deadpan/weasely shit with is never really delivered. Yeah, sometimes his line readings are weird, but mostly they are bored. John Heder does a unique voice so you can’t really tell its him… which I suppose suggests he’s trying. No… the voice talent won’t turn this bad movie into good cheese.

And the mediocre animation won’t either. No, this isn’t The Incredible Bulk or Food Fight… it’s just lazy, sub-par animation that might have passed in 2000 as a tv kids’ show. Decent, if flat backdrops, generic and flat character models, nothing as advanced as fur or fabric simulations. Just cheap animation that is borderline incompetent, but doesn’t cross the border.

This is just a bad movie but not in a good way. I was disappointed. We demand cult classic badness and we get common mediocrity. Jeesh.

Score: 54