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Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey (2023)

~Review by Grawlix (November 2024)

So, maybe you’ve heard, but a couple of fairly high-profile properties have fallen into the public domain recently. The most significant of these is obviously Steamboat Willie, a landmark short subject, both for its use of synchronized sound and as the first appearance of Mickey Mouse. It seems like, lately, whenever the copyright chains come off some beloved childhood character, the first thing anybody wants to do is turn him into a cinematic serial killer. Of course, it’s always best to tread lightly when it comes to Disney – the Mouse’s legal department being a more ruthless and bloodthirsty beast than any horror film slasher – so those have been a bit slow in production. But, only slightly lower in profile to become fair game, as it were, are the characters of A.A. Milne, primarily Winnie the Pooh. Disney has no small interest in Pooh themselves, so even this sort of adaptation is not without its dangers, but apparently director Rhys Frake-Waterfield was willing to roll the dice.

Shot over approximately ten days on a shoestring budget, and starring nobody famous, Blood and Honey actually starts somewhat promising. Via narration over (barely) animated slides that reasonably evoke the original E.H Shepard illustrations of the Pooh books, we learn that Christopher Robin has gone off to med school, and apparently never said goodbye to his special forest friends. Hurt, confused, and very hungry, Pooh, Piglet, Owl, and Rabbit devour Eeyore (but it doesn’t matter anyway…) to survive the winter. Rabbit and Owl then vanish from the narrative (and Tigger is, regrettably, never mentioned at all) but having acquired a taste for blood, Pooh and Piglet apparently decide to take their abandonment issues out on anyone foolish enough to wander into the Hundred Acre Wood. In time, one of those poor souls is the returning, grown-up Christopher Robin, new fiancé in tow. And while Pooh and Piglet want to take their time with him, they’re a bit less discriminating about his fiancé, as well as a sextet of women who arrive for a girls’ retreat at a conveniently isolated cabin.

The problems with Blood and Honey are many and varied. Let’s start with the fact that it’s really unclear which characters the movie wants us to identify with. Christopher Robin would be the obvious choice, but he’s off-screen for the majority of the runtime and while actor Nikolai Leon gives one of the more committed performances in the film, there’s not a lot for him to work with. We spend a surprising amount of time with Pooh and Piglet as they stomp around their lair, occasionally tormenting Christopher, dismembering their latest victim, and consuming (and possibly processing? Sometimes the chain of events is murky) some honey, but the fact that they don’t speak, even to each other, doesn’t leave much room for character development. The movie also seems to vacillate quite a bit as to how much sympathy we’re supposed to feel for Pooh and Piglet but, separation anxiety notwithstanding, considering they’re basically anthropomorphic versions of Bittaker and Norris, any at all would be a pretty big ask.

This leaves us with our cabin full of women. We get a decent intro to one of them, Maria (Maria Taylor), as she recounts a traumatic encounter with a stalker to her therapist. She’s the primary catalyst for the group’s woodland excursion, though it appears that all of them are looking for a mental reset of sorts, and you’d think she’d be the focus when the killers show up, but the opposite kind of happens, and to a large degree she fades back into the group.

This leads into the next major issue of Blood and Honey, as well as a host of associated minor ones. Maria is initially set up as the classic Final Girl, and while I can appreciate a slasher film’s desire to subvert expectations, the way it goes about subverting them seems a bit suspect. When Pooh and Piglet begin their inevitable assault on the cabin, most of the women’s agency practically vanishes and they’re reduced to screaming, begging victims, rarely able to take meaningful action. Look, I’m not trying to make some sort of meta-analysis about the implications of whether or not a low-budget video nasty like Blood and Honey can pass the Bechdel Test (though, oddly enough, I think it does), but the fact that most, if not all of these female characters are lesbians (yeah, it just kinda throws that one in there), the fact that it revels in the uncompromising brutality of their murderers, and the fact that there are a series of eye-rolling plot contrivances that keep them largely helpless, all seem oddly deliberate in a movie where a lot of things happen at random. Now, to be fair, Maria does end up with a bit more staying power than most of the cast, but this seems more the result of happenstance than being based on any action she takes for herself. Likewise, Pooh does have a few male victims, but these all come and go in the last ten minutes or so of the film and, honestly, seem to exist more to pad out the runtime than anything (the movie barely clears 85 minutes total, credits included). I realize I could be overanalyzing here, and that there are plenty of more benign explanations for how things play out (inexperience and incompetence on the part of the filmmakers being foremost among them) but I can’t deny that a lot of the creative decisions that were made left a bad taste in my mouth.

Effects-wise the film is a mixed bag. The elephant in the room is that the Pooh and Piglet masks look pretty bad. Purchased off the shelf from a (admittedly high-end) California outfit called Immortal Masks, they would look damn good at a local invite only costume party, but in a feature film they seem generic and just plain fake. Also, their demonstrable lack of articulation (on the Pooh mask, especially) is, I suspect, one of the major reasons why the characters don’t talk, since attempting to match mouth movements would have looked patently ridiculous. The gore is okay. The filmmakers probably didn’t have the resources for anything too over-the-top, and the more elaborate kills suffer from some obvious CGI enhancement. The violence is at its most effective when things are kept grounded. Piglet’s weapons of choice are a length of chain and his trusty sledgehammer and a little extra oomph from a well-timed sound effect lands far more effectively than trying to make a woodchipper kill work on a budget. Honestly, the movie’s sound is definitely one of its stronger points. Andrew Scott Bell’s soundtrack isn’t likely to make Michael Giacchino jealous, but it punches well above its weight regardless (and is frankly better than the movie deserves).

There came a point when I was watching Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey when I questioned if it was even worth the wait, from the filmmaker’s perspective, for the title characters to fall into the public domain. They might not have to worry about royalties to the original creator anymore, but they were still operating under significant creative restrictions so as not to run afoul of the Disney interpretation of the character which, let’s be honest, is more recognizable to most audiences than the original stories ever were. Not allowing Pooh and Piglet to talk may have been primarily a practical compromise, but there was probably no small amount of concern that aping Disney-Pooh’s lackadaisical “Oh, Bother” speech pattern, accidentally or on purpose, could have put them in some unwelcome legal crosshairs. By the filmmakers’ own admission, there was genuine concern over whether or not they could have Pooh wear a red shirt! Stripped of their most defining features, Pooh and Piglet just become generic slasher monsters in goofy masks (not to be confused with Goofy masks). And at that point, why not just create your own legally distinct characters and try to make a good movie with no narrative restrictions instead of this movie that honestly doesn’t seem to know where it wants to land? That appears to have been the tack taken by the makers of The Mean One, a 2022 Dr. Seuss inspired horror film, and the Child’s Play franchise, though obviously inspired by real dolls like Cabbage Patch Kids and My Buddy, has proven more resilient and, at this point, recognizable than either.

But I suppose it is the name that gets people in the door. I was going to wrap up with a comment about there being no prize for being first to crank out a low-effort parody slasher, but clearly that’s mistaken in this case. Blood and Honey cashed in to the tune of some 5 million bucks. Modest, by film return standards, but many, many times the movie’s initial budget and, as such, an unmitigated success. Coming up we can apparently look forward to horror films based on Peter Pan, Bambi, Pinocchio (though they were beaten by about 30 years on that one), and of course Blood and Honey 2. I’m sure it will be terrible. But, they’ve confirmed Tigger will be in it. I can’t wait to see it.

Final Grade: D

Yeah, I realize that I’m rating this lower than most of the Uwe Boll films I’ve watched, but I’d sooner revise those ratings downward than go any higher here. Beyond the shameless cash-in of the premise, beyond the ineptitude of the execution, there is an unmistakable strain of mean-spirited nastiness that runs through this movie that goes beyond a simple ironic juxtaposition of the source material. It’s hard to know exactly what sort of artistic statement Frake-Waterfield was trying to make here, if any, but if these undertones crept in by accident, that’s bad, and if they’re there on purpose, that’s worse.