Winnie-The-Pooh: Blood And Honey Review: A not-so-sweet slasher
Oh bother, indeed. A.A. Milne's classic tale enters the public domain in the form of a horror movie with very little brains—and even less Eeyore
Image: Jagged Edge Productions
Old-school exploitation promoters like Roger Corman must surely admire how the makers of Winnie-The-Pooh: Blood And Honey seized on an item in the news cycle—Winnie-the-Pooh entering the public domain when the copyright expired on A.A. Milne’s 1926 book, Winnie-the-Pooh—and cranked out a quickie horror movie. Normally, the idea of Pooh becoming fair game for any artist to interpret (minus specific elements owned by Disney) might inspire a fake trailer for an inappropriate movie reboot by a site like Funny or Die. But writer-director Rhys Frake-Waterfield went and cranked out a whole feature. Then, when its trailer went super-viral, production company ITN gave him extra money to do reshoots, although judging by the end credits, which mention “principle photography,” it still wasn’t enough to hire a proofreader.
There was a time—let’s hypothetically call it “the ’80s”—when audiences reasonably knew what to expect from a slasher movie. Creative kills, some gore, a bit of sex and nudity, a slow-moving and indestructible killer with some kind of gimmick, and the promise of a sequel that’ll be pretty much the same thing. A glut of copycats watered down the formula, and many of the imitators these days deliver very little exploitation and not enough story to make up for that loss. So to say that Winnie-The-Pooh: Blood And Honey delivers everything a slasher movie should is higher praise than it used to be. Marketing alone would have guaranteed this movie a certain percentage of curious eyeballs, but Frake-Waterfield made sure that what genre fans see is everything they expected. In a nutshell: two hefty dudes in animal masks doing really gruesome shit.
Like so many slashers, this is a movie perfectly targeted to adolescent boys who are right on the cusp of “stuff for children is stupid!” and “violence is hardcore!” They’re the kind of kids at the right age to laugh when Blood And Honey’s opening narration refers to the original incarnations of Pooh and Piglet as “abominations.” Lest such labeling makes any reader feel excluded, rest assured; if you’re in any way still in touch with that inner Beavis or Butt-head, you’ll find something here that’s huh-huh cool.
Eschewing too much backstory, which the best slashers usually save for the sequel, the opening animation suggests that back in the days of Christopher Robin’s childhood, his animal friends, rather than sapient plushies, were actually demonic man-animal hybrids. When the boy became a man and went off to college, an unprecedented winter hit the Hundred Acre Wood, causing Pooh to stave off starvation by eating Eeyore and promptly going insane. Resentful at the human who abandoned them, he and Piglet vowed never to speak again, which is sad news for anyone hoping to hear classic Pooh catchphrases after every kill. Despite supposedly rejecting their humanity, however, they still dress like fat lumberjacks.