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

Arguably the virally infamous provocation winnie the pooh: blood and honey is a boring and depressing movie. This is intended as a kind of cheeky, transcendentally gruesome sequel to AA Milne’s classic her 1920s children’s book. winnie the pooh and Pooh’s Corner House — A story inspired by Milne’s own young son, Christopher Robin Milne and his beloved stuffed animal. Since the 1960s, these stories have been brought to public attention by Disney animated adaptations and expansions by Walt. These creations mine gentle adventures from the interaction of a chubby hapless teddy bear and his friends.

blood and honey With Milne’s Winnie the Pooh copyright expiring in 2022, writer and director Rhys Flake Waterfield saw an opportunity for a clickbait-worthy horror twist on the character. Disney’s copyright to its own version remains in effect.) In the horror film version, Pooh and his cowardly friend Piglet are all grown up and become serial killers. Masked villains silently hack unnamed victims. Very little framing or story. It’s a series of repetitive murders, mostly interspersed with scenes of Pooh lurking in the woods or stalking his victims.

blood and honey For viewers in love with practical effects gore and classic exploitation films, there are a few things going on. It’s not a groundbreaking or particularly amazing movie, but it does a few things well.

• Scream. For people who are into horror, not so much because of the tension of the storytelling or the sheer sense of menace, but because they really enjoy seeing dangerous levels of human suffering. blood and honey have plenty of it.The acting is often stiff and the script repetitive, but the cast screams uniformly compelling pain and terror as Pooh and Piglet threaten, torture, and kill them. there is many Screaming, lamenting, pleading, begging in this movie.
• Gore. Given the film’s meager budget, it’s no surprise that it relies on real-world effects for head-smashing, throat-slitting, and face-ripping violence. There’s nothing bleak about it, but there are enough close-ups of skull cracks and dripping brains to thrill exploitation fans.
• grotesque. Frake-Waterfield blood and honey, Pooh will take repeated breaks from butchering to cover his expressionless face with dripping sticky slime, which he sometimes drizzles on his victims as well. The whole movie has a unique raw “texas chainsaw massacre From the atmosphere of 1974, a hut in Pooh’s Forest full of antlers and bones, to the quiet, bulky menace of Leatherface style, the grotesque focus. Designed to repel and shock audiences, it’s filled with maddening and extreme imagery that makes it virtually unnerving.

Photo: Jagged Edge Entertainment

But that’s all still pretty petty for a movie that doesn’t give the killer a reason to exist or the audience a reason to root for the victim. Early in the film, a grown Christopher Robin (Nikolai Leung) and his wife Mary (Paula Coys) head to the 100 Acre Wood to reunite with the childhood companions he abandoned and terrorize them. find only From there, the movie provides Pooh and Piglet with fresh, screeching meat at mechanical intervals.

The pacing is leaden, the visuals are dark, and there’s little reason to care about anyone on screen. The only real tension in the film comes from the flashbacks in which the main victim, Maria (Maria Taylor), describes a series of escalating encounters with the stalker.

But as an exploitation film built around turning a beloved childhood figure into a terrifying monster, blood and honey Many of the most needed core elements are missing:

• recognition. the filmmaker behind blood and honey I have read the story of Winnie the Pooh or know what the story is about. There’s no nostalgia, parody, satire, or even a basic sense of recognizable humor here. All the inhabitants of the 100 Acre Wood are missing except Pooh and Piglet. (Background memorabilia — what appears to be scribbled in blood on a plywood slat — reads “Eeyore RIP.”) Pooh and Piglet are general villains rather than specific villains. There’s little point in tying these characters to their pasts, or the audience’s memories this movie is supposed to skewer.
• dialog. It’s possible that Frake-Waterfield avoids speaking to his character because Disney’s Pooh character’s voices are so iconic and memorable that he can’t use them. may think that silence only makes them more opaque and alien. But it doesn’t make them feel individual or idiosyncratic. They might literally be fans of Leatherface in weird masks. Aside from a brief Christopher Robin flashback, there’s nothing in the film that separates a villain from a horror-movie psychopath who chops up intruders.
• humor. See, the idea of ​​cuddly figures like Pooh and Piglet turning into slaughter monsters is inherently a bit hilarious.And even the most popular horror movies usually use at least a little humor to reset the tension between dramatic sequences. blood and honey So candid and relievingly harsh that audiences are set to laugh at it instead of necessarily laughing at it. Especially in awkward moments like a group of women finding the words “GET OUT” scrawled in blood on the window of their rental cabin. When someone screams in fear that someone might be lurking outside, someone else replies, “Who wrote that!”
• any sense of purpose. The idea that innocent childhood fantasies inevitably darken over time is a very poignant one. is. (See Pixar’s emotional mileage inside out Even the vague resonance between Maria’s stalker and Christopher Robin’s murder-joying friend is the harrowing of others who feel entitled to more than you want or from you. It alludes to a larger story about emotions…you can give them away.

Photo: Jagged Edge Entertainment

no theme winnie the pooh: blood and honey, no bigger ideas at work and very few stories. Aside from the screams and blood, there’s nothing you can’t get out of the trailers and posters, and for ’70s exploitation fans, it’s a sequence in which a woman is unlikely to have her shirt ripped off in a fight. Bloody death topless.

blood and honey Finally, we finish with one more old-fashioned touch. The title card says WINNIE THE POOH WILL RETURN. But before that, Frake-Waterfield focuses on creating the whole. “Childhood Horror Universe” It focused on other public domain classics that got Disney adaptations. peter pan neverland nightmare and Bambi: Reckoning It’s already in the planning stage. That prospect is scarier than anything that actually happens in this movie.

winnie the pooh: blood and honey It hits theaters as a limited special event from February 15th to 21st, followed by a streaming release.