February 25, 2023
by Carla Hay
“Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey”
Directed by Rhys Frake-Waterfield
Culture Representation: Taking place in the fictional Hundred Acre Wood in England, the horror film “Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey” (which has warped versions of characters in A.A. Milne’s “Winnie the Pooh” book) a features an all-white cast of characters representing the working-class and middle-class.
Culture Clash: After their human friend Christopher Robin “abandons” them in a remote forest area surrounding Hundred Acre Wood, the monstrous Winnie-the-Pooh and his sidekick Piglet go on a bloody rampage against people who go to Hundred Acre Wood.
Culture Audience: “Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey” will appeal primarily to people who might be curious to see a horror version of “Winnie the Pooh,” but the movie is just a bloody and boring mess with no redeeming qualities.
“Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey” is the very definition of bottom-of-the-barrel horror trash. It’s not scary, funny or interesting in any way. It’s just a bloodbath slasher flick that is deeply misogynistic. There could have been so many unique and clever ways to put a horror spin on A.A. Milne’s classic 1926 book “Winnie the Pooh,” but this garbage movie does nothing but show people getting murdered by two silent villains wearing cheap-looking animal masks.
Written and directed by Rhys Frake-Waterfield, “Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey” is a perfect example of a ripoff that takes a famous brand name to entice people into watching a movie and offers nothing entertaining in return. The murder scenes look like a dull checklist. And it’s an understatement to say that all the movie’s characters are very stupid. The mindless conversations and bad acting are more painful to watch than some of the killing scenes.
The beginning of “Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey” shows a series of illustrations resembling what you might see in a children’s book. A narrator explains that in a remote forest area surrounding Hundred Acre Wood, a bear named Winnie the Pooh (also known as Pooh), a pig named Piglet, a donkey named Eeyore and a human boy named Christopher Robin used to be the best of friends. But all that changed years later, when Christopher went away to attend college and “abandoned” the animals to fend for themselves.
Pooh decided that in order to survive, he and Piglet had to consume their dearest friends. And that meant “Eeyore was no more.” Pooh and Piglet “renounced their humanity and returned to their criminalistic roots, swearing never to talk again.” Christopher then became the No. 1 enemy of Winnie-the-Pooh and Piglet.
Years later, when Christopher (played by Nikolai Leon) is in his 20s, he returns to Hundred Acre Wood with his fiancée Mary (played by Paula Coiz), who is skeptical that Christopher really had these animals as friends when he was a child. (Frederick Dallaway plays Christopher as a child, in a flashback.) Christopher has taken Mary to the forest to find his former pals and prove to Mary that they exist. And you know what that means: Someone is going to get killed.
In this case, it’s Mary who doesn’t make it out alive, while Christopher is held captive and tortured by Winnie the Pooh (played by Craig David Dowsett) and Piglet (played by Chris Cordell), who keep Christopher tied up in a filthy barn. But it wouldn’t be a trashy and sexist horror film if a bunch of nubile women didn’t gather in this remote area to be the obvious next victims of bloody murder, while they are filmed in various states of undress. And these dimwitted characters barely do anything to try to escape from the woods.
The leader of this gullible group is Maria (played by Maria Taylor), who says she has a stalker and she’s been having nightmares. So, of course, the first thing Maria wants to do when she has a stalker and nightmares is go to a remote wooded area, where there’s no place nearby to go for help and cell phone service might not be available. It’s practically a requirement for mindless horror movies.
Maria brings along her pals Jessica (played by Natasha Rose Mills), Alice (played by Amber Doig-Thorne), Lara (played by Natasha Tosini) and Zoe (played by Danielle Ronald). Later, another woman shows up named Tina (played by May Kelly), and her fate is easily predicted. All of these characters are written as very hollow and forgettable.
Lara is the big-breasted “sexpot” of the group, where most of her scenes show her in her underwear, in a bikini or topless. Movie director Frake-Waterfield makes the camera linger on her private parts in voyeuristic ways. It should come as no surprise that Lara is in a hot tub when she encounters Pooh and Piglet, who inflict torture and violence on anyone they see.
Eventually, Maria’s stalker—a decrepit creep named Logan (played by Richard D. Myers)—shows up too. He has three goons with him: Colt (played by Marcus Massey), Tucker (played by Simon Ellis) and John (played by Jase Rivers), who don’t escape the wrath of Pooh and Piglet. However, the violence that the men get in the movie isn’t nearly as sadistic as the violence that the women get. The men in the movie also don’t strip to their underwear or have any naked private parts on display in an exploitative manner.
“Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey” is so moronic, it tries to make Pooh having honey dripping from his mouth look like it’s supposed to be terrifying. It’s not even amusing. The last scene of this time-wasting junk proves that “Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey” was just a heinous cash grab that was made so that the filmmakers could get some kind of twisted pleasure from doing a movie showing women getting violently murdered in worse ways than men.
Fathom Events released “Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey” in select U.S. cinemas, for a limited engagement, from February 15 to March 2, 2023.