I knew of this one, and that i eventually will have to feature it here, and i guess the moment arrived for me to actually see the damn thing when they – almost to my surprise – localized it for Halloween 2023, and put it as an Amazon Prime Video streaming exclusive.
Which does remind one of the state of the service itself, but whatever, it’s basically free, not beholden to another paid subscription within Prime Video, they bothered to even dub it, let’s not post-pone the inevitable any further.
“Inevitable” since this movie’s only reason for existing is the original Winnie The Pooh’s book falling into public domain in the US in January 2022.
So let’s be honest, sooner or later someone was simply gonna do this movie, i mean, the public domain slide is why we have so many unrelated Amytiville movies, for example.
Though in a way you could argue there’s really nothing to say about a movie called Winnie The Pooh: Blood And Honey that the title, trailer and poster didn’t already made explicit.
And this movie is EXACTLY what you think it is and was marketed as, i can’t fault it for that.
…. i can for everything else, as this is a baffling thing to even exist as a full length (kinda) film and its execution does the stupid ass idea no favor.
Like i said in my review for Pinocchio’s Revenge, i have some fondness for the juvenile concept of “turning children stories into horrors”, despite how embarassingly no effort it is as a whole, some children story do have sinister undertones or fucked up scenarios, so i’m not against the idea per sé.
Though worry not, this is exactly the cynical, braindead and desperate, pathetic endeavour you’d think it would be. And it deserves all of your contempt, but first, let’s talk story.
Instead of being Christopher Robin’s imaginary friends he conjures up in the woods for wholesome adventures, Pooh and the other inhabitants of the 100 Acres Forest are real humanoid creatures that he befriended and brought food over time, forming a strong bond with them.
But when time came for Christopher Robin to enter college, he had to leave his forest friends behind to fend for themselves, without imagining that out of any food, they would eventually had to resort killing and eating Eeeh Ohh, then swore a pact to hate mankind and never speak again, reverting to their feral selves..
This is a fact Christopher Robin learns the hard way when he comes back to the 100 Acres Forest in order to visit his old “kemono friends”. Also, some girls having a vacation in an isolated house in the area also will have to face Pooh’s and Piglet lust for blood, meat and honey… though the latter isn’t hard to find as Pooh’s face mask secretes its when he’s hungry, so…
Yeah, couldn’t even bother to explain if they ate Rabbit or Tigger, so we have just Pooh and Piglet.
The premise is stupid, the reimagined lore seems to have been hastily written in 1 hour sitting, and i’m not gonna say i can do a better job, because i simply wouldn’t bother with it, with an idea this simple and stupid you don’t need lore… also because ideally i would have never made this an actual feature lenght film, this should have been 30 minutes, at best, ideally it should have stopped with the intro scenes explaining the aforementioned twisted reimagining of Xi Jiping & friends and their reckoning with Christopher “I Wanna Live” Robin.
Sadly, even that looks like ass, they wanted to the lore intro as an animated sequence in a pencil sketch-esque style… which feels like the just animated some really rough ass storyboards.
Then again, i suspect most of the budget went to crafting that “Pooh Myers” mask, since the actor playing Piglet gets a generic ass halloween dollar store warthog mask, gotta save cash for the killings of the random girls that are in the movie to show off dem bahonkas, get killed, or both, so this thing can accrue shit in it to make the runtime closer to the fabled 90 minutes.
It doesn’t even manage that, since the movie it’s 85 minutes long, but we’ll get to that later.
What surprised – and enraged – me more than anything else is that while it doesn’t look good.. i expected far worse, there’s some production values to it, there some money thrown into it and the cinematography (which is oddly acceptable) and overall makes for a far more presentable looking movie than i would have expected, in total honesty.
Yeah, often it’s badly lit to the point it’s not easy to discern what’s happening in some scenes, it’s not surprising to learn it was the rushed product made of 10 days of filming in the woods of East Sussex, but i’m not gonna complain too much as we’ve seen way cheaper and worse looking low budget films, heck, we featured the entire Bunnyman trilogy of movies, this is definitely a notch or two above that, it looks like an actual movie made with a budget that can be considered as such.
In terms of content, this is as basic as a slasher can get, Pooh is the stand in for your Michael Myers unstoppable, undying and nearly unflinching silent killing machine that butchers and tortures anything and anyone it meets with any tool he can get his humanoid hands on, and Piglet which is a straight up sadist, because why not, i guess, so he uses chains and a sledgehammer.
The girls are doing the “no phones” remote getaway holiday thing, and one had actually many horrible encounters and experiences with a stalker, not that it means anything, it just there for the sake of runtime, and to obviously “foreshadow” her future unlucky meeting with the creatures, but fear not, the characterization is non-existent all around, with some scraps never developed about Pooh, no that there’s is much of an actual plot or story to tell, nor there is some wit to the stupid premise they came up and.. admittedly could have done something with it. Anything.
The play it straight too, which here means it all feels as drab as it looks, not that forced humour was gonna make it better, but some semblance of wit or creativity to anything, even in terms of kills they set off to do more, which i would commend if they simply weren’t capable of actually doing them proper, regardless of the budget or ability, managing to fail even a “running over someone’s head with a speeding car” kind of deal. Extra points for trying anyway to actually trying and doing the kills with mostly practical effects… minus points for trying anyway and failing.
Fuck, even disregarding what i think about the grotesque (if stupid and juvenile) premise, you could have supplemented it with some actual imagination, applied some creativity to the gimmicky premise, but there is nothing here, it’s so devoid of anything of value it’s almost impressive in its own right, not surprising, but astonishing in how bad and forgettable it is.
It’s the kind of absolute bottom feeder, abysmally shit slasher that makes one feel dumber by watching it, so aggressively poor and cynical it is that it just stuns you, and then can’t even be bothered to reach 90 minutes, not even in order to give the movie a proper ending to attach the inevitable sequel bait, it doesn’t so much end as it stops.
But it doesn’t matter, as it made a considerable profit overall, and not only there’s an already greenlit sequel in the works, but an entire shared universe, gonna milk this gimmick fast, hard n cheap.
Hopefully they can at least deliver some decent kills and use the increased budget to make the sequel something more sub-par and not just something subterranean bottom feeder bullshit.
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