What if the gentle living teddy bear Winnie-the-Pooh turned into a sadistic, half-human serial killer for some reason? That’s the depth of writer-director Rhys Frake-Waterfield’s storytelling and character development in 2023’s abysmal Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey. Currently nominated for five Razzies including worst picture and director, this cheap and inartful British exploitation flick offers no subversive take on A.A. Milne’s classic characters and gives no new angles on threadbare horror tropes. Instead, we get a cookie-cutter slasher flick in which two extremely corny unstoppable killing machines ‒ a full-grown Piglet is also thrown into the mix ‒ stalk and brutally dispatch a bunch of interchangeable, scantily dressed young women at a cabin in the woods.
Perhaps we shouldn’t expect much from a poor man’s Roger Corman who has produced over two dozen schlocky flicks within the past three years, including titles such as Easter Bunny Massacre, Croc! and last year’s Firenado, the latter of which he also directed. But slapping together this level of dreck simply because Milne’s beloved characters recently entered the public domain seems particularly shameless. The only attempt at narrative logic connecting the film with its source material occurs within the opening moments, as simple line-drawn animation ‒ not unlike E.H. Shepard’s illustrations to Milne’s 1926 children’s book Winnie-the-Pooh ‒ is used to explain that Christopher Robin’s coming of age and subsequent abandonment of his friends in the Hundred Acre Wood caused them to turn feral and vicious in their malignant and festering hatred for humanity. You see, in this story, they aren’t stuffed animals come to life at all. Rather, they are half animal-half human mutants that grow mad from hunger without Christopher Robin around to care for them, eventually devouring the melancholic Eeyore in order to survive.
As unimaginative as the backstory is, this brief animated sequence is by far the film’s most compelling moment. From there, we see a grown-up Christopher Robin (Nikolai Leon) bring his fiancée, Mary (Paula Coiz), back to the Hundred Acre Wood to meet his old pals, only to find the place dilapidated and far more ominous than he remembers, a locale akin to the homestead of the Sawyer clan in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and other rural horrors, forebodingly adorned with (mostly) animal skulls. Likewise, a six-foot-tall Pooh and a tusked Piglet – played respectively by Craig David Dowsett and Chris Cordell in hokey, dime-store masks – simply ape any number of unstoppable, soulless killers who have come before, with a silent Pooh essentially acting as a Michael Myers-type killer, and the squealing, sledgehammer-wielding Piglet recalling Leatherface.
As Pooh and Piglet make short work of Mary and torture Christopher Robin for revenge, the film still clings to the flimsiest of connections to Milne’s original material (his “characters by” writing credit feels like a desecration). At one point, Eeyore’s erstwhile tail is used to flog Christopher Robin, and Pooh appears to have the ability to summon swarms of bees. But from there, we’re left with a random group of young women who don’t seem to have any distinguishing personality points outside of the blatant clichés they embody. As they all settle into their their fancy rental lodge, the Instagram-obsessed bikini babe is among the first to go, in one of the film’s many poorly staged kills involving a Pooh-driven car awkwardly crushing her head. Heavily reliant on CGI over practical effects, the slayings mostly look amateurishly rendered, with computerized blood spurting out unrealistically. In other scenes, such as when Piglet stalks two women near a narrow indoor lap-swimming pool, the chases lack any kind of tension and the murders simply make no sense. First limply slapping the water with a chain as though swinging a pool noodle, Piglet then enters to the water to give incremental chase to a woman who doesn’t even attempt to escape, the chest-high water only making his swings of a sledgehammer more cumbersome. Most fans of schlocky slashers will take Jason Vorhees in space any day.
Elsewhere, the film simply mimics kills from the classics, as Pooh impales a victim against a door with a butcher knife, à la Halloween. If such moments amounted to parody, we might have something here, but Blood and Honey’s greatest sin lies in its utter lack of humor. A close second is its dearth of genuine horror. Devoid of ominous atmosphere or a coherent story, and with wooden performances and clunky dialogue that typically amounts to either exposition or repetitive versions of “Oh my god, why are you doing this!?,” the film’s trappings are so well-worn and its writing is so uninspired that it serves as a rare flick with virtually no redeeming qualities, the novelty of its premise feeling tawdry and pilfered rather than campy or scary.
In poaching the public domain, a film of this ilk is exploitative by definition, but there’s potential for compelling horror to be formed around the denizens of the Hundred Acre Wood, especially with a healthy dose of irreverent comedy. None of that applies this film, but that’s not stopping Frake-Waterfield and his U.K.-based production company, Jagged Edge, from making a sequel. Virality, even for irredeemable slop like this, can fill the coffers, and occasionally provide for enough of a budget to flesh out such a hollow endeavor the second time around. Just look at Terrifier 2, which is leagues better than its predecessor. Blood and Honey went viral enough to eventually grace 6,000 theater screens and rake in nearly $5 million against a $100,000 budget, making the forthcoming 2024 sequel inevitable. But considering Jagged Edge Productions also has designs on public domain-plundered projects such as Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare, Bambi: The Reckoning and Pinocchio: Unstrung to go along with the nursery-rhyme-themed cheapies it already has in its stable, it’s far more likely that the sequel will simply double down on its inept, relatively lucrative exploitation.
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