While Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey is playing in hundreds of theaters this week, the filmmakers had no idea that would happen when they were planning the movie. Despite some reshoots that followed the viral success of the movie’s trailer, Blood and Honey is still just a low-budget horror quickie, virtually indistinguishable from any of the 80-plus other movies that producer Scott Jeffrey has worked on since 2016.
Jeffrey has thrown every conceivable gimmick into his assembly-line exploitation movies, previously offering up horror takes on everything from Krampus and the Tooth Fairy to Jack Frost and Humpty Dumpty. When A. A. Milne’s 1926 book Winnie-the-Pooh entered the public domain last year, Jeffrey and writer-director Rhys Frake-Waterfield jumped at the chance to take Milne’s beloved childhood icons and turn them into generic horror villains. It was just another hook, something to fit between horror movies about Medusa and the Nutcracker, but no one had seen a Winnie-the-Pooh horror movie before, and the trailer struck a chord by twisting those innocent characters into something sinister.
It’s one thing to be amused by hulking, murderous versions of cuddly bear Winnie-the-Pooh and his porcine friend Piglet for three minutes in a trailer, but it’s another thing to sit through nearly 90 minutes of these mute, lumbering killers as they dutifully plow through a series of forgettable victims. Despite the absurdity of its premise, Blood and Honey is almost entirely straight-faced, with no campy jokes or winks at the audience. Frake-Waterfield brought some snarky humor to his equally ridiculous 2022 Christmas horror movie The Killing Tree, but here he takes the evil versions of Pooh and Piglet as seriously as any slasher-movie villain.
Blood and Honey begins with a crudely animated storybook-style sequence reimagining the familiar origin story of Pooh, Piglet, and their animal friends. They’re still the companions of a young boy named Christopher Robin, but the narrator describes them as “adolescent,” allowing for their eventual growth into characters that can be conveniently played by adult actors. The narration also refers to them as “abominations,” even before Christopher Robin abandons them in the Hundred Acre Wood so he can head off to college.
It doesn’t take much for them to go feral, and without Christopher Robin to provide for them, they kill and eat Eeyore the donkey in order to survive. They then swear vengeance on humanity, vowing never to speak again, thus losing at least half of what makes them distinctive characters in the first place. Five years later, the adult Christopher Robin (Nikolai Leon) returns to the Hundred Acre Wood with his fiancée—or possibly wife, depending on the dialogue—Mary (Paula Coiz), eager to introduce her to his childhood friends.
Instead, Pooh (Craig David Dowsett) and Piglet (Chris Cordell) kill Mary and capture Christopher Robin so they can punish him for leaving. All of this happens before the opening credits, and the main human protagonists are a group of female friends who take an ill-advised vacation in a house on the edge of the Hundred Acre Wood, where people have apparently been disappearing for quite some time. Thus Blood and Honey turns into a rote slasher movie, as the implacable killers take out the interchangeable characters one by one.
Frake-Waterfield makes some perfunctory efforts to distinguish those characters, but it all feels like filler to pad the running time and space out the expensive special-effects shots. The closest that Blood and Honey has to a main character is Maria (Maria Taylor), who’s introduced talking to her therapist and gets a lengthy flashback as she describes her experiences with a stalker. Maria’s trauma has no bearing on the plot, though, and it doesn’t even provide her with a character arc, since she quickly just becomes one more screaming woman running from the killers. Two of her friends get a handful of lines to establish that they’re a lesbian couple. One other friend wears glasses.
As Pooh and Piglet, Dowsett and Cordell always look like exactly what they are, two big guys in crude animal masks, and there’s little to distinguish them from dozens of other cut-rate slashers. Frake-Waterfield throws in gruesome kill scenes that provide brief fodder for gorehounds, but there’s nothing creative in how Pooh and Piglet dispatch their victims.
Blood and Honey can’t imitate the familiar visuals of Disney’s animated Winnie-the-Pooh movies, which are still under copyright, but surely there’s more Milne material that Frake-Waterfield could have drawn from to make the violence more memorable. When Pooh uses Eeyore’s severed tail to whip the captive Christopher Robin, that’s the kind of delightful perversion of wholesome children’s entertainment that the trailer promised, and that the movie barely delivers. Even with the expanded reshoots, the most brutal moments still often take place offscreen or shrouded in darkness, to compensate for the limited resources.
Blood and Honey plods its way to an anticlimactic non-ending, with a post-credits promise for Pooh to return, like he’s a member of the Avengers. Ever the opportunists, Jeffrey and Frake-Waterfield are now planning a whole interconnected universe of horror-fied versions of public-domain children’s characters, including Bambi and Peter Pan, along with a Blood and Honey sequel. They’ll probably make for fun trailers, at least.
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“Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey” is now playing in select theaters.
