Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey 2
Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey 2
Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey: It has been more than four decades since audiences have been drawn to bloodbath films such as those featuring psychos with chainsaws, a lunatic in Halloween attire, a maniac wearing a hockey mask, an arsonist in a striped shirt and a fedora and finally, one whose face is pierced with S&M tools… why not a psycho Winnie the Pooh?
Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey earned some contempt – also called free advertising – because of its design scare tactic – taking two favorite fairy tale characters and putting them in a horror movie. But there was no actual plot in the wannabe slasher movie. The aptly certified “Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey” was easy to make with a $50,000 budget, and was too dull and incompetent to be real outrage, let alone a surprise success of any kind.
The film was released on 1652 screens and went on to earn $1.7 million gross. Judging by the title, ‘Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey’ seems more like an outrageous TikTok than from a movie, but alas it was badly cut, badly edited, and shockingly neither horror or humor, but rather awkward.
One of the ways that you can tell how uninspired it really was was that the film never actually delivered on what it promised in its parody, and managed to make you believe that you were looking at Aguirre: The Wrath Of God killer paedophiles in plush outfits attributed to legendary characters conceived by A.A. Milne. You were just watching a slasher with a Pooh bear mask that was made of rubber and did not look like Pooh. (Rather it was the likeness of Christopher Cross.)
And yet at the same time, by its very existence, “Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey” proclaimed a new strange world which would be the extension of horror. The rights on the characters of Pooh bear had been held by the Walt Disney Co. from 1966 (That of course was the time when all classics were voraciously eaten by Disney like your-guesed-it Winnie-the-Pooh, licking the insides of his thick pot of honey).
The first of the Pooh books, published in 1926, indeed became public domain in the United States on January 1, 2022, and just a few months later Rhys Frake-Waterfield began filming his horror horrorscope curio.
His grand plan was very much akin to something you would see in a porn movie – at least the ones that are spoofs of actual films and are called things such as ‘Pulp Friction’ or ‘Legally Boned.’ WInnie the Pooh Blood and Honey was not porn, per se, but it was kind of a blood-soaked torture. Theres no real horror, its just a testament to how casually one can turn a beloved IP into garbage.
I’d be less cynical about all this if I was not sure that the “Winnie the Pooh” horror films would have at least somewhat of breathing transgressive air in them were the works made by Damien Leone. But they don’t. The point is that these are, first and foremost, sameness slasher films. You might say, as early reviewers have, that “Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey 2 is BP 2 Than BP 1, for it has more money and pizzazz”.
But story is what Frake-Waterfield and his co-writer, Matt Leslie, are not good at. The bloated incoherence does get more deluxe lensing than the first book, and maybe I mistook Simon Callow for an actor. He looks particularly terrified while trying to explain to Christopher Robin about Winnie-the-Pooh, how did ‘the beast creatures’ come to existence over a scottish accent.
Then he tells Christopher that there was a scientist who systematically kidnapped children and gave them animal cells. All very good, back story of a ‘Lass of the Faithful’ only follows with a great diversion from how the backstory would have been designed in the prior film which was animated by milne The teddy bears.
There might be a lot more happening in healthy blood and honey 2, but let’s not kid ourselves. It’s mostly a hot mess. One year after WW1 the hundred acre massacre in the town of ashdown, the protagonists able to blame everyone in the town of Ashdown for the hundred acre massacre blame most Christopher robin, who they believe did it, doing blame effects on his character did rather help to bring out his negative feelings on Kravitz. Why anyone would pin this crime on such a nice fellow is beyond me, and the film doesn’t really run a tangent on that in any case, save to make the point that chris is today a badly traumatized walking case.
In the original, Christopher Robin was played by Nikolai Leon, an actor who apparently actually was natural for this image. Now Scott Chambers who is not so eager comes on like he is going through some audition of his starring in the Ed Sheeran Story.
This time around, there are even more creatures, and the mayhem is even more pronounced than before; there are more dismemberments, decapitations and face-peeling episodes, especially within the final rave- scene in which everyone at the dance floor is obliterated. Pooh, redesigned also has his overalls and red flannel, but this time it’s been modified – the face, looking even grimmer – a murderous Grinch of Jim Carrey rather.
Owl (Marcus Massey) appears garbed in a royal crow costume one sees in Friedman films except that this one speaks with an accent that oozes aristocratic evil and Tigger (Lewis Santer) – who does not appear until that rave sequence in fact has a suspicious face which (for no reason in particular) looks a lot like that of Pooh. However, he has blades slashing like razor sharp claws and the Tiggerish spirit that he possesses is perhaps the only thing that one can consider as associated with the tigger of the legend here.
Rhys Frake-Waterfield is probably a bit of a filmmaker, but more than anything else, he is a British schlock maven who in 2021 quit his job at an energy company so that he could start marketing low budget horror films. In less than two years, he had put out 36 features with names like “The Loch Ness Horror”, “Snake Hotel”, “Alien Invasion” and “Medusa’s Venom.” Somewhere up in drive in-theater heaven, Herschell Gordon Lewis and Ed Wood are smiling, even if in Frake-Waterfield’s hands, they are made to look like Scorsese and Spielberg.
However, one cannot help appreciating how clever and driven he is in selling his vision. He has rolled out announcement for expansion of the Poohniverse including such movies as Pinocchio Unstrung, Bambi: The Reckoning, Poohniverse: Monsters Assembled. I do not think that audiences are likely to be very unnerved by the content any time soon. But you can be sure the IP is shaking in its boots.
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- Genre: horror, Thriller
- Country: United States
- Director: Rhys Frake-Waterfield
- Cast: Scott Chambers, Tallulah Evans, Ryan Oliva