pooh, he just loves the honey
Will 'Winnie-The-Pooh: Blood And Honey' Turn Out As One Of The Worst Movies Of 2023? Here's What The Reviews Say
A new horror film is out, and it's getting a lot of buzz. Why? Because it stars Winnie The Pooh murdering teens! "Winnie-The-Pooh: Blood And Honey" has Piglet and Christopher Robin and all of your favorite cartoon characters, but this time as psychopathic serial killers in a slash film.
The current Rotten Tomatoes score on this movie is nine percent and honestly it was hard to find any real positive words said about it.
It exists is because the copyright hit is now public domain
"Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey" struggles to be notable outside of its irreverent IP comic relief, despite simplifying itself. Take away the Pooh and Piglet stuff, and you have a ho-hum stalker thriller that treats its one-dimensional characters as punchlines for gory scenes its budget can't fully deliver on.
It took long enough, but the first “Winnie the Pooh” book finally lapsed into the public domain. That they have run directly into the arms of an entirely different kind of exploitation — an R-rated, ultra-violent slasher movie — may seem ironic, but was probably inevitable. You can’t pull a pendulum in one direction for 60 years without expecting it to swing the other way, and hard.
There’s no sense that the filmmakers behind Blood and Honey have ever read a "Winnie-the-Pooh" story, or have any idea what goes into one. There’s no sense of nostalgia, parody, satire, or even basic recognition humor here. Apart from Pooh and Piglet, all the other Hundred Acre Wood residents are missing in action. (A background memorial — seemingly scrawled in blood on a slat of plywood — reads “Eeyore RIP.”) Pooh and Piglet are generic baddies instead of specific ones, apart from Pooh making it clear that he resents Christopher Robin abandoning his old playmates after childhood. There’s virtually nothing meaningful to tie these characters to their past — or to the audience memories this film is supposed to be skewering.
The gore is plentiful but the story is thin
The film’s script makes some notably curious choices, first and foremost in its structure. We start and end with Chrisopher Robin, the very same Christopher Robin who is ever-present in the film’s backstory, trailer, and official marketing, but the bulk of the movie involves the introduction and rapid destruction of these five friends before Christopher is set free and returns at the tail end. At the same time, few of those poor characters are given memorable attributes or enough focus to become full-fledged characters instead of fodder. Christopher has no connection to these women — their wildly separate stories making the movie feel like two films duct-taped together. The script is also full of a variety of dialogue that inches close to memorably bad camp but, yet again, stops short. Christopher “I think something’s wrong with Piglet! He just killed my wife!” Robin comes off with the most memorable dialogue, but it’s still far too little and often cut with pacing issues that permeate the rest of the movie as well.
Eschewing too much backstory, which the best slashers usually save for the sequel, the opening animation suggests that back in the days of Christopher Robin’s childhood, his animal friends, rather than sapient plushies, were actually demonic man-animal hybrids. When the boy became a man and went off to college, an unprecedented winter hit the Hundred Acre Wood, causing Pooh to stave off starvation by eating Eeyore and promptly going insane. Resentful at the human who abandoned them, he and Piglet vowed never to speak again, which is sad news for anyone hoping to hear classic Pooh catchphrases after every kill. Despite supposedly rejecting their humanity, however, they still dress like fat lumberjacks.
All of these little plot holes — combined with the fact that Pooh and Piglet have the bodies of grown men who never even attempt to mimic animal mannerisms — add to the sensation that this is just a generic slasher movie with Pooh masks slapped on it. Frake-Waterfield seems determined to shock audiences, yet the lack of effort is considerably more offensive than the blasphemy. But while he missed the opportunity to really maximize the horror potential of the “Winnie the Pooh” franchise, the beauty of public domain is that anyone else is now welcome to give it a try!
Most critics think almost everything about the film is just straight up bad
But if that weren't enough, this is also top-to-bottom a shoddy production. The performances down the line are all atrocious, with no characters making any impression whatsoever. Frake-Waterfield’s screenplay attempts to give us one-note explanations of who these characters are (Maria was stalked, another friend loves her phone, two other friends are in a new relationship, one dies before she even gets there, and the other friend…has glasses?), but they’re little more than fodder for Pooh and Piglet, and Maria and her friends seemingly were cast in order to provide middle school kids something to ogle when they inevitably watch this for laughs. Pooh is able to rip the shirt and bra off a woman with little effort, while another character writhes in the middle of the road, hogtied in a bikini, waiting to get run over by a car. It all adds up to the most generic and poorly crafted slasher you can imagine, and a weak joke without a punchline.
TL;DR
"Winnie-The-Pooh: Blood and Honey" is a torture-porn travesty. The indie horror flick exploits the end of the teddy bear character’s US copyright — to violently unimaginative ends.
"Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey" is a humourless bloodbath that does nothing interesting with its premise.
And unfortunate for us, as this is one of those movies that seems more concerned with having its actresses' breasts in the frame than it is their faces.
The goal of “Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey” was clearly to ruin your childhood. The bizarrely uninspired horror disaster will make you wish you kept your money instead.
Watch the trailer
