Something’s wrong with Piglet, he killed my wife!
Main Cast: Nikolai Leon, Maria Taylor
Director: Rhys Frake-Waterfield
This shouldn’t take long.
When Winnie-the-Pooh hit the public domain in 2022, writer/director Rhys Frake-Waterfield wasted no time in turning the beloved children’s story into a horror movie. I was onboard immediately. That’s not to say this is a good movie.
The opening animation shows the story we all know, Christopher Robin, the 100-Acre Wood, Pooh and all his friends. But when Christopher Robin goes off to school, leaving the animals alone in the woods, they almost starve, and end up turning on one of their own to survive. Now, Pooh doesn’t just crave honey, he’s also got a taste for blood. When Christopher returns years later, hoping to introduce his wife to his friends, he realizes the consequences of his leaving.
Cut to a bunch of women whose names I don’t remember renting a house in the woods for the weekend, and that house just happens to be real close to the 100-Acre Wood. And Pooh and Piglet are hungry.
WINNIE-THE-POOH: Blood and Honey is an hour and 24 minutes of mayhem and slaughter, just the thing for a kid who grew up on a diet of Freddy and Jason, Pinhead and Michael Meyers. I should have loved this movie.
Spoiler: it’s NOT a good movie.
But honestly, I didn’t really expect it to be; if you’ve seen the movie poster and how terrible the Pooh head looks, you know to come in with incredibly low expectations, which I did.
The plot is standard slasher stuff as the girls are picked off one at a time by Pooh and Piglet. The gore is wild and the effects are great—not surprising; Frake-Waterfield has a background in visual effects, with credits on movies like DINOSAUR HOTEL, THE CURSE OF HUMPTY DUMPTY, and SPIDER IN THE ATTIC.
What I’m lacking here, and the thing that kept throwing me out of the movie, is a villain I can get behind. Yes, I know Winnie-the-Pooh, and I understand his motivation is based around feeling abandoned by his best friend. But couldn’t they have least TRIED to make the mask not look like a rubber head someone was wearing? Pooh is a BEAR for God’s sake: put some freaking FUR on him!
Instead, we get a killer in overalls wearing a rubber mask I could probably pick up at Spirit Halloween in a month.
The acting was what it was, nothing to brag about, but thank God I had subtitles on because this is a British production and those were some thick-ass accents. If not for subtitles I would have missed 80% of the dialogue in WINNIE-THE-POOH: Blood and Honey. And what a shame that would have been, I say with the utmost sarcasm.
I will probably watch the sequel at some point, but for now I feel this particular itch has been scratched and I can move on to something more … nuanced? Produced? Something with a budget and actors? But I will also say that, if I had the time and absolutely NOTHING else to do, this movie could send me down a huge, deep rabbit hole; just looking at some of the actors’ other credits, there’s a whole genre here I didn’t know existed but am SO very interested in. Just some of the other movies these actors have appeared in: EASTER BUNNY MASSACRE: The Bloody Trail, POPEYE’S REVENGE, FAIREST OF THEM ALL, THREE BLIND MICE, THE LEGEND OF JACK AND JILL, CINDERELLA’S CURSE, HOOK, PETER PAN’S NEVERLAND NIGHTMARE, TOOTH FAIRY QUEEN OF PAIN, TOOTHFAIRY 5, MARY HAD A LITTLE LAMB and BAMBI: The Reckoning. Yeah, I want to watch ALL of those!
Just not right now; I’ve got to find something to take the taste of WINNIE-THE-POOH: Blood and Honey out of my mouth first. If you can go into this movie with ground-level expectations, knowing they will never rise above the floor, then I think you can get something fun out of it. But if you’re looking for something that’s going to reward you for the time you spent on it, you should really go find something else. I saw this one on Peacock and I know there are definitely better movies on there.
C. Dennis Moore is the author of over 60 published short stories and novellas in the speculative fiction genre. Most recent appearances are in the Dark Highlands 2, What Fears Become, Dead Bait 3 and Dark Highways anthologies. His novels are Revelations, and the Angel Hill stories, The Man in the Window, The Third Floor, and The Flip.
Leave a Reply