Certificate: 18 (strong violence, gory images, threat). Running Time: 84 mins. UK Distributor: Altitude Films
WHO’S IN IT?
Nikolai Leon, Craig David Dowsett, Chris Cordell, Maria Taylor, Natasha Rose Mills, Amber Doig-Thorne, Danielle Ronald, Natasha Tosini, Paula Coiz, May Kelly, Richard D. Myers, Simon Ellis, Jase Rivers, Marcus Massey, Danielle Scott, Mark Haldor, Frederick Dallaway, Toby Wynn-Davies
WHO’S BEHIND THE CAMERA?
Rhys Frake-Waterfield (director, writer, producer, editor), Scott Jeffrey (producer), Andrew Scott Bell (composer), Vince Knight (cinematographer)
WHAT’S IT ABOUT?
After being abandoned by Christopher Robin (Leon), his friends in the Hundred Acre Wood vow deadly revenge…
WHAT ARE MY THOUGHTS ON WINNIE-THE-POOH: BLOOD AND HONEY?
Before I get into what I think about Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey, let me answer your three most pressing questions. Yes, this is a real movie. No, there’s nothing that Disney, the A.A. Milne estate, or anyone else can do about it. And yes, it’s every bit as terrible as you might be imagining.
The reason that this movie exists is because, as per standard copyright laws, Milne’s original 1926 book – which introduced the world to Winnie-the-Pooh, Piglet, their human friend Christopher Robin, and their adventures in the Hundred Acre Wood – entered the US public domain last year (Disney, of course, still owns copyright to their versions of the characters). This was enough for filmmaker Rhys Frake-Waterfield to move forward with his gorier and nastier rendition of the beloved characters, but to slightly paraphrase Dr. Ian Malcolm, he was so preoccupied with whether or not he could, that he didn’t stop to think if he should – and he really, really shouldn’t have.
It opens with a rather well-done hand-drawn animated prologue that gives us some backstory: Christopher Robin (Nikolai Leon), having grown up looking after his animal friends in the Hundred Acre Wood, leaves them behind to attend college, but in his absence Pooh, Piglet and the others begin to starve, resorting to them eating poor Eeyore for sustenance, causing them to turn feral and swear revenge on Christopher Robin for abandoning them. Some time later, he returns with his fiancé Mary (Paula Coiz), but very quickly discovers the brutal acts that his former friends are now capable of.
Honestly, I was kind of into it during this beginning section. It’s still terrible, mind you – the dialogue is pretty bad, and the acting isn’t that much better – but it did seem like it was really embracing its absolutely ridiculous core concept and treating it with as much seriousness as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which added a level of bad-movie charm where you feel the earnestness despite the horrible execution. I could definitely see this working in a so-bad-it’s-good kind of way, like The Room or Blackbird, and was getting a bit excited to see where they would go with the rest of the movie.
But then, it suddenly gets much, much worse, to where it’s no longer the fun kind of bad: it’s just bad, plain and simple. After that opening sequence, the movie morphs into the most archetypical slasher movie since the last terrible one: a group of young women go to a remote cabin right in the middle of the Hundred Acre Wood, where they are each targeted and picked off one by one by both Pooh and Piglet (played by respective actors Craig David Dowsett and Chris Cordell, wearing stiff latex masks of the characters for the entire movie) in the most over-the-top and gruesome ways that the minimal budget can allow. That’s pretty much the rest of the film, and it doesn’t even have the grace to be good at any of those things.
For one, it doesn’t have characters; sure, there are technically people on the screen, but they’re never characters, ones who feel in any way developed or defined, and are just there so that they can be brutally executed by the villains. Since they’re all so indistinguishable from each other, and knowing that most if not all of them are going to meet their grisly end soon anyway, there’s hardly any point in caring about any of them if they do end up dying, not even when some are given backstories involving stalkers that are quickly dropped and never mentioned again. Some are even gratuitously put there to give the viewer some unnecessary eye candy, including one female victim whose shirt is suddenly ripped off by Pooh, leaving her breasts exposed for no real reason, and another later on whose entire purpose (other than being offed in a rather horrific manner) is to pose seductively in a hot tub. It really is the kind of low-budget exploitation slasher flick that you would expect to see parodied in any film nowadays, the only noteworthy thing being that the killers just happen to be Winnie-the-Pooh and Piglet.
As for those beloved children’s characters, here they’re just slasher movie villains, no different than all the others that have come before. Nowhere beyond that opening does the film really play into their familiar backgrounds or identifiable traits, to where you could easily replace them with other popular cartoon characters (like, say, Dick Dastardly and Muttley) and only about 10% of the script would be different. You’d still have scenes where the killers stalk their woefully underwritten victims and then murder them in increasingly contrived and sometimes unintentionally hilarious ways, such as one where Pooh simply slaps someone repeatedly until they’re unconscious, or when Piglet just whacks a giant hole into someone’s face with a sledgehammer, his weapon of choice. It takes disappointingly few opportunities to go for broke with taking these characters into much darker territory, once again outside that eye-catching opening, and does so little with them that you wonder why they even bothered.
As you can imagine, even for the ultra-low budget that it had, Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey is also pretty badly made. Aside from some occasionally decent cinematography, Rhys Frake-Waterfield’s filmmaking recalls the notoriety of infamous low-budget studio The Asylum, from the stilted performances he gets out of his actors (though not even Daniel Day-Lewis could sell the absolutely awful dialogue that they have to deal with), to a handful of computer-generated gore effects which look like they were created by the VFX artists’ interns during their lunch break, and all the way down to some appalling sound mixing that makes some of the ADR recordings feel much more tinny next to the dialogue recorded on-set (though that honestly could be down to the stereo quality of the screen I saw this on, but the fact that I don’t know for sure is not working in the movie’s favour).
From what I know about this filmmaker – who seems to be making a career with stock slasher templates that happen to centre around popular characters or folk lore, such as last year’s The Killing Tree (about a killer Christmas tree) and sci-fi horror The Area 51 Incident, and apparently has ones featuring fellow Disney icons Peter Pan and Bambi, as well as a sequel to this one, currently in the works – Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey is pretty much par for the course, and is apparently not even quite as bottom-of-the-barrel as some of his other movies. However, that doesn’t excuse the utterly poor level of filmmaking that is still very much on display here, not to mention the distractingly stock slasher tropes and, perhaps most insulting of all, the lack of ambition that could have been put into making a genuinely scary Winnie-the-Pooh movie, but is instead a whole lot of bother.
SO, TO SUM UP…
Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey is an atrocious slasher that happens to feature, but does insultingly little with, the famous Hundred Acre Wood inhabitants gruesomely killing a collection of non-characters in gruesome and exploitative fashion, under poor filmmaking that doesn’t make the central concept nearly as fun as it could have been.
Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey is now showing in cinemas nationwide –click here to find a screening near you!
