‘Winnie-The-Pooh: Blood And Honey’: Everything You’d Expect, Yet Somehow Less
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Spoilers Ahead!
Ever since the release of the first trailer, the internet has been abuzz with talk of Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey. When the silly old bear became public domain in January 2022, the first thing that happened was a slasher film based off of the classic characters, outside of Tigger, who is still copyrighted. The film was initially set for release on streaming services, but the buzz was loud enough that the film not only received a limited theatrical release, but also a sequel that is in the works at the time of this writing.
Now we’re here, though. The buzz can be satiated. How is the movie itself?
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Honestly, it starts out promising enough, which is admittedly a bit of a surprise. The first scene is a simple hand drawn animated sequence that goes into a brief backstory of Christopher Robin and his friends, as well as how they became feral and murderous. As nice as the opening is, it instantly creates major questions and plot holes. The animals (Owl, Rabbit, Pooh, Piglet and Eeyore) come to rely on Christopher Robin for food, but it’s established that they survived in the forest long before he found them. So when he left for college, why didn’t they just go back to how they were surviving before?
Because then the movie wouldn’t happen.
It then shows an adult Christopher Robin taking his new wife to the Hundred Acre Wood so that she can meet his old childhood friends. The scene where the pair gets to the forest and things are clearly wrong is actually the best one in the film. It’s atmospheric, shot well, and fairly tense. The two hide from Pooh, but we don’t actually see him. We just hear his thudding footsteps and heavy breathing. It’s surprisingly effective.
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But, frustratingly, that’s the highlight of the film. From there all suspense is done away with for mindless violence and gore, all capped by a Christopher Robin who spends the movie whimpering and crying. Yes, it would be tragic for him to witness his childhood friends kill his wife and torture him, but it gets annoying really fast. Piglet starts choking his wife to death with a chain, and instead of stopping him, Christopher Robin gives Piglet a soft push that naturally does nothing, then just stands there and cries while his wife is choked to death. So what, he has no protective instincts for his new wife?
When his wife is dead, Christopher gets cornered by Pooh and Piglet who sloooooowwlllly walk up to him as he cries and begs them to stop. After what seems like twenty minutes, the two grab him, and we cut to the main story.
We next start to follow the main cast of characters, a group of five women who go to an isolated cabin right outside of a forest where people have been disappearing for years so that one of them can mentally recover from the trauma of a stalker. What are their names? Future Victims One, Two, Three, Four, and Five. They might have real names, they do seem to call each other by more traditional names, but they’re all so bland and one-dimensional characters that they’re utterly unmemorable. If you’ve ever seen a slasher film, you already know all of them. They’re there to die horribly, and even that is a bit hit-and-miss. Some of the kills are usual slasher fare, such as one victim being put through a woodchipper and another being run over by a car, while others die off-screen.
Oh, and the car? It’s fully functional even after the kill, but the characters never decide to actually use it to get away. They also have easily accessible cellphones that they never think to use either.
Overall, it shows nothing new and hits every single beat that ever other cheap slasher set in the woods hits. Characters running fast with the killer taking a leisurely stroll but they can never get away? Check.
Getting out of the woods just as a car approaches, and the characters run up to it in a panic and “He’s coming to get us! We need to get away!” “Now hold on, just calm down and tell me what’s going wrong.” “There’s no time! We have to get out of here! He’s coming!” “Who? Who’s coming? What’s going on?” “Too late! There he is!” Check.
Protagonist sees the killer for a second, but when she looks again, he’s gone, and she isn’t sure if she saw anything? Check.
Threatening note written on the door/window/wall in blood? Check, check, and check.
It ends mostly like you’d expect. Christopher Robin finally works up the courage to fight his old friends, and Pooh seems to be dead but of course he’s not and attacks again. The slight change is that they actually kill the Final Girl, then the movie abruptly ends.
So story? Other than a decent opening five minutes or so, it devolves into every cliché in the book, steadily getting worse over the course of the film.
Image Source: Fangoria
This might not be as bad if the director got a few quick pointers on how to edit a movie. There are moments during the action scenes where the screen will cut to black for a few moments, then pick up again right where it left off. It’s like the film needed to have a ninety minute runtime, but they only filmed enough for a seventy-five minute film. As a result, characters stand still screaming, while Pooh and Piglet meander over to them, then it’ll cut to black for a few moments before the action starts up again.
He could have also hired a person who had an idea of how to work with sound. Characters are whispering, but you can’t hear what they’re saying because the background noise is drowning it out. The director doesn’t seem to understand everything that goes into an effective, scary scene. He thinks that us seeing a man wearing a cheap rubber Spirit Halloween Pooh mask will be horror enough.
So we have a bare bones plot full of holes and threads that are brought up for a moment only to be dropped just as fast. We have flat, uninteresting characters who are just there to die, poor pacing and a lack of good atmosphere, poor technical filmmaking, made all the more frustrating by the somewhat competent opening scene, giving us a taste of what kind of movie we might have gotten with a more talented, experienced filmmaker.
You know something that would have improved the film? A sense of humor. Not a slapstick, silly sense of humor, but lean in to the absurdity of its premise. Give it a pitch black sense of humor in the same vein as an early Chucky movie. That would at least have improved the fun factor.
Image Source: Dread Central
But that’s not the point. The point is the shock value in pretending that the big men in cheap rubber masks are older, murderous versions of the characters we all grew up loving. It was filmed over the course of ten days for peanuts and already has a 2.8 million dollar box office total with more days and countries to go. Despite the (at the time of this writing) 5% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, it’s a major financial success.
The biggest thing the film has going for it is that it’s not boring… most of the time. It definitely has its moments. For as bad as it is, it’s mostly entertaining, though not due to any actual quality. It will most likely get a small cult following, be shown at cheap midnight horror nights at small theaters, and that will be its legacy. It’s a movie best watched with a crowd who all know what they’re getting into. If it’s not your kind of film? Skip it.
Final score: 3/10
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