Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey review: Gleefully sick clickbait horror

The virally famous provocation is not to be misunderstood Winnie-the-Pooh Blood and HoneyThis is a dark, sad movie. It’s meant as a sort of cheeky, transgressively gruesome sequel to A.A. Milne’s classic 1920s children’s books Winnie-the-Pooh The House at Pooh Corner — stories inspired by Milne’s own young son, Christopher Robin Milne, and his beloved stuffed animals. Since the 1960s, those stories have been kept in the public eye by Walt Disney Animation’s animated adaptations and extensions, which mine gentle adventures out of the interactions between a chubby, hapless teddy bear and his friends.

Honey and Blood was made possible in 2022, when Milne’s copyright on Pooh expired, and writer-director Rhys Frake-Waterfield saw an opportunity for a clickbait-worthy horror twist on the character. (Disney’s copyright over its own version of Milne’s characters remains in effect.) The horror movie version shows Pooh and Piglet, his shy friend and grown-ups who have turned into serial killers. That’s pretty much the entire movie right there: a couple of goons in grotesque Pooh and Piglet masks, silently hacking their way through a bunch of all-but-anonymous victims. There’s barely any framing or narrative; it’s just a series of repetitive murders, mostly spaced out with scenes of Pooh lurking in the woods or stalking victims.

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Honey and BloodIt does offer a couple of things that will appeal to those who love classic exploitation films and practical-effects gore. It isn’t an innovative movie or a particularly surprising one, but it does a few things well:

• Screaming. People who enjoy horror are not so much interested in the story or fear of actual danger but because of their love for watching horrific levels of human suffering. Honey and Blood It has plenty. Although the acting can be stiff and repetitive, the cast manages to convincingly evoke terror and agony in their characters, Pooh, Piglet, and other actors. It is possible to have a LotThis movie features screaming, crying, begging, and whining.
• Gore. Given the movie’s micro budget, it’s no surprise that it leans on practical effects for its head-smashing, throat-slitting, face-rending violence. There’s nothing here horror mavens have never seen before, but there are sure enough close-ups of splitting skulls and dripping brains to give exploitation fans a thrill.
• Grotesquerie. Frake-Waterfield leans hard into the “honey” part of Honey and BloodPooh frequently takes breaks during the slaughter to cover himself in sticky slime. Sometimes he also drizzles it over his victims. The whole film has a distinctively raw “Texas Chain Saw Massacre 1974” vibe, from Pooh’s woodsy cabin filled with antlers and bones to his Leatherface-style silent, bulky menace to the focus on the grotesque. There’s plenty of stomach-churning extreme imagery designed to repulse and shock the audience, and it is effectively unsettling.

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All of this is still very thin grist for movies that don’t give their killers any reason not to exist or to make the audience feel for them. The movie opens with a young Christopher Robin (Nikolai Leon), and Mary (Paula Coiz) heading to the Hundred Acre Wood in search of their childhood friends. They find nothing but horror. The movie provides Pooh with fresh, screaming meat every other minute.

The pacing is leaden, the visuals are murky, and there’s pretty much no reason to care about anyone on the screen, except to idly wonder how they’re going to die, and what their innards will look like when they do. The only real tension in the movie comes from a flashback, as lead victim Maria (Maria Taylor) describes a series of escalating encounters with a stalker, and for once, the audience doesn’t know exactly what’s about to happen.

However, it is an exploitation movie that focuses on making beloved children into frightening monsters. Honey and Blood Many of its core elements are missing.

• Recognition. There’s no sense that the filmmakers behind Honey and Blood You have never read Winnie-the-Pooh stories or had any clue about what they are. There’s no sense of nostalgia, parody, satire, or even basic recognition humor here. Other than Pooh, Piglet and the Hundred Acre Wood inhabitants, they are all absent from 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.
• Dialogue. Frake-Waterfield may be avoiding having his characters talk because the voices of Disney’s Pooh characters are so iconic and memorable, and he can’t use them. Perhaps he feels that their muteness is making them less transparent and alien. It leaves them with no sense of identity or particularity. It’s possible that they could look like Leatherface fanatics wearing strange masks. Apart from brief Christopher Robin flashbacks, there’s nothing in this movie to distinguish the villains from any backwoods horror-movie psychopaths carving up intruders.
• Humor. C’mon, the idea of figures as cuddly and bumbling as Pooh and Piglet turning into slaughter-monsters is inherently a bit hilarious. Even the most serious horror films use humor to ease tension in between the dramatic scenes. It’s not all bad. Honey and Blood It is unrelievedly and straight-faced, so the audience will inevitably be set up to have a good time laughing at it rather than with it. Particularly during clunky moments like the one where a group of women find the words “GET OUT” scrawled in blood on the windows of their rental cabin. When one of them squeals in fear that there’s a lurking figure outside, another responds, “Whoever it is probably wrote that!”
• Any feeling of purpose. A very poignant idea is the notion that innocence’s childhood fantasies will eventually become darker. So is the idea that kids’ fantasies have weight and meaning that outlasts childhood. (Look at how much emotional mileage Pixar’s From the Inside Its imaginary friend BingBong is its companion. Even the vague resonance between Maria’s stalker and Christopher Robin’s murder-happy friends hints at a bigger story about the distressing feeling of other people feeling entitled to more out of you than you’re willing to or capable of giving them.

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There’s no theme to Winnie-the-Pooh Blood and HoneyThere is no greater idea than this, but it’s not even a story. There’s nothing in it you can’t get from a trailer or the poster, except the screaming and the blood — and for ’70s exploitation fans, a sequence where a woman improbably gets her shirt ripped off in a fight, so she goes to her bloody death topless.

Honey and Blood Another old-fashioned touch is added at the end: A title card that says “WINNIE, THE POOH WILL RETURN.” Before that, though, Frake-Waterfield is focused on creating a whole “childhood-horror universe” focused on other public-domain classics that got Disney adaptations. Peter Pan’s Neverl Nightmare and The Reckoning: BambiAre already in development. It is more frightening than what actually happens in the movie.