The surprise horror movie Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey is likely a preview of what’s to come when well-known stories and characters fall under the public domain. However, the cheerful Pooh that most people recall is from the Disney animated shorts and films which began in 1966 and still fall under current copyright laws. So if you were gonna make a killer Pooh bear, he better resemble author A.A. Milne’s original creation and not the Disney version or else you’ll incur the wrath of the many lawyers of the Mouse House. In writer/director Rhys Frake-Waterfield’s version, Pooh and Piglet are on a killing spree after their dear Christopher Robin (Nikolai Leon) grows up and abandons them (they ate poor Eeyore). However, most of the movie is about thick-bodied malevolent men in masks preying upon young British women who are regularly in their underwear or bathing suits. To say this movie is creatively lacking is an understatement. Blood and Honey isn’t just a bad B-movie, it gives a bad name to enjoyably bad B-movies. 

The only reason this movie exists is for the novelty of its existence, so that younger horror fans, and those with a healthy appreciation of irony and bad movies, can say, “I watched a killer Winnie the Pooh movie.” No other thought was given to this entire enterprise after that first one. The intellectual property fell into the public domain and now the filmmakers are scooping it up for a cheap and easy, “Well, I haven’t ever seen [wholesome or kid-friendly character] behave like that,” and “that” being blood-thirsty and cannibalistic. I am not against the very idea of this movie, but Frake-Waterfield puts no subversive connections to anything happening. It’s just a low-rent slasher movie with British coeds being knocked off by a guy in a bear mask and a guy in a pig mask. The characters could have been renamed as anything and the movie would have had the same impact. For that matter, the masks could have been swapped with, oh let’s say, a mask of Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. Then we could come up with some half-baked explanation of Nixon and Ford reawakening from the dead and seeking to kill the youth vote to better ensure Republican candidates win elections. It would make just as much sense as anything else. The characters of Pooh and Piglet are not in any way reflected upon or given distinct personality or any connections to their non-killer interpretations. In the opening narration, we’re told that the vengeful animals of the 100 Acre Wood swore to conveniently never speak again and to revert back to their base nature. Fine, but then why is Winnie the Pooh still wearing human clothes? Why are they using tools? Why are they walking on two legs (four legs good, two legs bad)? And, most inexplicably, when did Pooh learn how to drive a car? There’s an onscreen kill where Piglet positions a captured woman in the path of a car tire, and it seems torturously convoluted for “killer animals reverted to being animals.” The entire enterprise lacks any subversive connection to the characters and story it’s intending to upend, and the whole movie feels creatively void.

Here’s another example of how little thought was put into this movie beyond getting it to completion. The main character has a past trauma of being molested by a man who was stalking her and broke into her home. For our own edification, this scene is played visually for us, with the intruder taking their time to slowly pull down the strap of our sleeping protagonist’s shirt. So we have a past trauma and the character is now experiencing a new trauma, so from a writing standpoint, you would expect this horrible situation would be a way for the character to exorcise her trauma in a very extreme circumstance and there would even be a parallel for her to triumph over as a rudimentary character arc. It would, at the very least, provide a story justification for why our main character has endured her suffering, so as to work through that as her arc. Well, none of that seems to matter, nor are there any pertinent parallels, and so her past of having a creep break into her home, hover over her asleep, and touch her body was just prurient exploitation. Look, I understand the horror genre is built upon its tried-and-true exploitation elements, boobs and blood and the like. That’s what the audience for a killer Pooh movie comes to expect. I understand why Pooh is ripping the top off one woman before slamming her head into a meat grinder, though it still made me feel icky and sad, but that’s my central response. I did a lot of exasperated sighing and shaking of my head throughout the bloated 80 minutes of movie. After a slightly eerie and decently animated opening, this movie is creatively bankrupt on all fronts.

Winnie the Pooh and Piglet and the rest of the population of the 100 Acre Wood are products of Christopher Robin’s imagination, so him leaving them is more him moving on from his childhood enchantments rather than abandoning his friends. I guess this movie’s version chooses for them to have really existed, which raises some questions over what these creatures were doing before they ever met Christopher Robin. Were they animals and then Christopher Robin’s love and attention magically transformed them into anthropomorphic creatures? If so, then this little boy’s imagination has an amazing power to tap into. Although, to be fair, Disney itself made a 2018 movie with an adult Christopher Robin (Ewen McGregor) who was being followed by the stubborn animals of the 100 Acre Wood who sought him out to remind him about the power of friendships and belief that, I assume, he seemed to have lost track of as a jaded adult. 

Taking a look at the larger filmography of Frake-Waterfield, a devious pattern starts to emerge. The movies are built on title and concept, and there sure are a lot to choose from. As a producer, he has 21 movies released all since 2021 and another 14 in the works, including a sequel to Blood and Honey. Here, dear reader, are some of the titles of the past and future Frake-Waterfield productions: Dinosaur Hotel, The Legend of Jack and Jill, Spider in the Attic, Easter Killing, Wrath of Van Helsing, Croc!, Kingdom of the Dinosaurs, Curse of Jack Frost, The Killing Tree (about a murderous Christmas tree), Firenado, Monsternado, Bambi: The Reckoning, Mary Had a Little Lamb, Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare, Crocodile Swarm, Dinosaur Prison, and Snake Hotel. It almost plays out like a B-movie Mad Libs exercise. Take an animal people fear (snakes, crocodiles, dinosaurs) add a place (hotels especially, though is Snake Hotel a lodging intended for people who love snakes or for the snakes themselves?) and, when in doubt, swipe some public domain IP that has an innocent or more wholesome reputation and switch it up (Steamboat Willie put as a sex trafficker?). I’m not against schlocky low-budget horror movies that are acutely aware of their schlock. The killer Christmas tree movie actually seems ridiculous enough to be fun. Except, having seen Blood and Honey, I’m dubious that any of these will actually take advantage of their goofy concepts.

Even if you were turning into Blood and Honey for the ironic yuks, there’s nothing to really laugh at here. This is a bad movie rather than an enjoyably bad movie. It’s a movie that only exists because somebody thought enough people would be curious to watch a killer Winnie the Pooh movie. That’s the reason I tuned in, but from the second minute onward, there’s no reason to bother watching the remaining mess. Just imagine a low-rent slasher film with unimaginative kills, boring characters, a lack of any subversive connections or reframing of its source material, and an ending that doesn’t so much conclude but simply give up for a sequel, and you’ll have replicated Blood and Honey. As one saving grace, I will say that the movie has more polished cinematography than most of its low-budget ilk. The startling lack of imagination of everything else is depressing, as is the fact that this movie has earned over four million at the global box-office, hoodwinking enough rubberneckers looking for a good bad time. The problem is that Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey is only a bad bad time. 

Nate’s Grade: D-