On the outset of Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey, an unbiased horror movie that makes feral killers out of the cuddly animals from beloved kids’s books, you hope for some entertaining grindhouse slasher. Two minutes in, you’re lowered to praying that it’s “so dangerous it’s good.” And by the point Pooh shoves a lady right into a woodchipper, her legs nonetheless flailing as she’s butchered, you must admit there’s no redeeming this hack job. Blood and Honey is a hundred-acre wasteland, a witless gory bore, and in the long run, you’re simply depressed that anybody frolicked engaged on it. Oh, trouble.
May there be a worthwhile story through which Pooh and Piglet, all grown up and demonic, stalk and homicide trespassers of their woodland residence? In that case, we’re barely given the chance to think about one: Blood and Honey is heavy on the splatter and hostile to plot, with its chief antagonist shortly turning into the form of indestructible goliath who operates as a colorless imitation of Halloween’s Michael Myers. When the film first garnered viral curiosity for its gimmick — screenwriter and debut director Rhys Frake-Waterfield started manufacturing as quickly because the rights to Winnie-the-Pooh entered public area in 2022 — the chances had been considerably broader. Maybe it might discover the lingering psychic wounds of childhood? Might it play towards our cravings for nostalgia and comforting fantasy? Or a minimum of wickedly satirize its personal plunder of current mental property? Nope, nope, and nope once more. Most disappointing of all, Frake-Waterfield seems to have solely a passing curiosity within the healthful canon he’s making an attempt to pervert. Whereas an excessive amount of fan service is annoying, no point out of Tigger appears like a grievous oversight.
However, to the motion, or as a lot as could be adopted on this haphazardly edited nightmare: Christopher Robin, now an grownup, returns along with his girlfriend to the forest the place he loved his harmless youth with a menagerie of pleasant speaking animals. He appears to remorse abandoning them within the wilderness — as if rabbits and owls aren’t completely at residence there. Robin has solely begun to clarify this when a lumberjack model of Pooh exhibits as much as homicide his companion, who had properly identified that they needn’t be wandering round part of the countryside that resembles a Brothers Grimm illustration by the use of The Blair Witch Mission. RIP. Pooh and a tusked, ogreish Piglet then abduct and imprison Robin in a treehouse the place Pooh whips him with the removable tail that belonged to Eeyore, presumably deceased as properly. That is about so far as we get with references to the supply materials.
In the meantime, in the identical foreboding neighborhood, a number of younger ladies arrive at a cabin they’ve rented for a ladies’ getaway. One in all them is recovering from trauma of some variety, however between the murky sound mixing (you’ll need subtitles) and laughably undistinguished characters (onerous to say if a few of these girls even had names), you gained’t bear in mind or care who’s coping with what.
Suffice to say, this ensemble accelerates the weird misogyny that seems to be the dominant theme of Blood and Honey. When you can at all times anticipate to see ladies impaled and dismembered in a slasher flick, Piglet and Pooh dispatch these practically similar coeds with a grim resolve that fails to impress shock, worry or the slightest hint of evil amusement, even whereas their strategies attain torture-porn extremes. Clearly, the slut taking bikini selfies within the scorching tub must pay the final word worth for this conduct, but the sight of Piglet pinning her down so Pooh can drive a automobile ahead and crush her head beneath the entrance wheel is curiously inert. Possibly it’s that they’ve zero motivation for this killing spree within the first place. Possibly it’s that the sufferer is so underwritten as to be functionally useless already.
Humorous {that a} low-budget leisure whose total attraction lies within the premise struggles for conceptual traction, although “battle” imparts extra of an effort than is provable right here. As a substitute, we careen amongst half-assed concepts: Pooh apparently now instructions a squad of vicious CGI honeybees… for one or two scenes. There’s a obscure suggestion that he and Piglet grew to become hunters so as to feed themselves, however they don’t eat their prey. No person figures out a means of studying who or what’s perpetrating this bloodbath — a minimum of allow them to discover a ebook with some solutions! — so we by no means acquire any perspective on the lore supposedly fueling the relentless violence.
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Blood and Honey leaves itself with no mechanism for growing and heightening pressure, its repetitive beats turning a scant 84-minute runtime right into a grueling slog towards a rushed, anticlimactic finale. Earlier than the credit mercifully arrive, we’re handled to the deaths of brand-new characters who stumble into the fray, together with one man with the sorriest faux British accent ever tried within the identify of cinema, and Christopher Robin begging Pooh to cease his homicidal rampage. He doesn’t. When the screaming is over, you understand that the grotesque Pooh and Piglet masks are the one memorable a part of what you’ve skilled, as if the film was a skinny conceit to indicate off a Comedian-Con {couples} costume.
Schlock, when correctly assembled, is a real pleasure. Rolling within the mud, to strike a piggy metaphor, could be cathartic. However with out an identifiable humorousness, camp, mischief or irony, all that’s left is dangerous style. The abject seriousness of Blood and Honey is its undoing, and what marks it as a bitter train in stunt advertising. For some time, you’ll be able to’t assist laughing reflexively at this film, anticipating the second when it’s going to reveal sly self-awareness and earn your affection. Sadly, the ready goes on until you lapse right into a numb silence, questioning why the monsterfication of a candy teddy bear can’t elevate the dreck you’re watching. In fact, you actually shouldn’t anticipate extra from an inventive imaginative and prescient based mostly in copyright legislation.
