Running time: 84 minutes
Starring: Nikolai Leon, Maria Taylor, Craig David Dowsett, Chris Cordell
Directed by: Rhys Frake-Waterfield
The story: Pooh and Piglet seek revenge after their friend Christopher Robin abandons then to go to college.
The verdict: Filmmaking is no easy business. You need lots of funds and lots of sandwiches, and all manner of other things. With that thought in mind, and knowing the independent roots of this project, I tried very hard throughout this to look for the positives.
Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey opens with an animated sequence which is actually really well done. A narrator sets the scene and everything has a very storybook like feel. We then switch to live action as we meet Christopher Robin returning to the One Hundred Acre Woods with his wife. There is an underlying feeling of foreboding and the audience eagerly awaits the moment Christopher Robin will be reunited with his childhood friends - so far, so good.
At this point, we are probably ten to fifteen minutes into the eighty-four minute film and that is also the point in which I ran out of positives. As soon as the titular character makes an appearance, Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey becomes a mess of a film.
To start with, the story itself is weak. The premise of childhood or imaginary friends being abandoned and that abandonment turning into something sinister is a great one but this angle is very quickly abandoned itself. Instead the film is predominantly focused on a group of girls who go to stay in the woods and become the target of the murderous Pooh and Piglet.
Maria, who is trying to move past a horrific incident with a stalker, rents a house with a group of her friends on the suggestion of her therapist (worse therapist in the world it turns out). There is little to know about these girls and I guess it doesn’t really matter as they begin to get gruesomely killed one by one. As the girls are murdered in increasingly horrible ways, the film devolves into torture porn and becomes just a terribly sexiest, derivative and painful watch.
There are baffling details as well such as a random “gas station” in the woods where the owner appears to be an American hillbilly - highly unlikely in East Sussex. Poor Maria is given a horrifying backstory (the only character who even gets the hint of one) and yet this backstory only serves as a reason for her to be in the woods. If you’re hoping for female empowerment, any semblance of justice or indeed for a female character to still be breathing come the credits then you’re in the wrong place.
Pooh and Piglet themselves are two men in masks. In all fairness, the masks are well made and certainly horror-esque. And of course it would be unfair to expect an independent, low budget film to have the resources to create actual monsters. However, there is not even much of an attempt to make them creature like. They move like humans and the masks are very static so very quickly the effect wears off. This isn’t Pooh and Piglet, it’s two blokes. This all might be slightly bearable if Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey was at least engaging - frankly it’s actually a bit boring.
Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey has been critically panned, however it has been a box office success so the very worse thing of all? It’s getting a sequel.
The rating: ⭐️
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