Well, I don’t know what I expected.
A little backstory, at midnight on the 31 of December 2021, AA Milne’s legendary character Winnie-the-Pooh went out of copyright and naturally enough the first thing that someone thought to do with it was to make a cheap and I mean cheap slasher movie out of the poor thing.
And on one level I get it, I really do. You want to be the first out of the gate to capitalise on… well, being the first to do something with the newly sort-of free to use characters and what’s quicker, easier and cheaper to make than a slasher movie?
A cheap, terrible, awful, no good slasher movie.
So, here’s the thing. I have no inherent peal clutching “Think of the children” reaction to seeing Pooh turned into a killer. Nor do I have an issue with it being bloody, violent and full of characters who deserve to die.
I don’t have an issue with it being dark, if your going to do something like this, go big or go home.
I do have an issue with this film being shockingly bad. That I have an issue with. Let’s start with…. Everything. Everywhere. All at once.
First, the plot.
This film has the wrong plot.
You see in this world, Pooh, Piglet et all are monsters who get abandoned by Christopher Robin, go feral and then start killing every human who crosses their path.
Fine.
Nothing wrong with that plot outline. It even explains why Eeyore doesn’t turn up. But where are Kanga? Roo? Owl? If you want to show them being a feral pack, then show them being a feral pack, show Roo having died from starvation, Owl being the one who locates the human prey, then Pooh and Kanga hunting them down before Piglet cooks the meat. Instead, Kanga, Roo and Owl are MIA.
Also, the victims are wrong. In a film like this, you should have the victims being linked somehow to the animals. Perhaps a group of wannabe writers or a group of English students making a pilgrimage to the hundred acre woods before getting picked off by the very creatures they’ve come to be inspired by.
Instead, we get the redshirts from a much better, more interesting, if still generic film.
Because our redshirts are in fact a group of friends who have come for a weekend in the country to help one of their number recover from a terrifying stalker. Which, why not make that film instead? A group of friends, trying to help a friend recover form a stalker by having a weekend at an isolated country house instead discover that the stalker has followed them and will stop at nothing to be reunited with his ‘love.’
Like I said, generic but it works.
And it’s thematically consistent. Instead, here, they just sort of appear in the narrative about twenty minutes in and immediately start to get rid of all those pesky limbs via a series of very disappointing kills.
Ans speaking of the kills, there are no real kills here that lean into the idea of feral human animal hybrids. I know that your Winne-The-Pooh looks like a tall guy in a cheap mask with his human eyes showing whilst wearing some yellow washing-up gloves and Piglet doesn’t look much better but could you not have done something with the idea of a bear? Just one person being disembowelled with a swipe of Pooh’s paws, that’s all I’m asking.
Instead, you could swap out Pooh and Piglet for Michael Myers, or just some random killer and nothing would change. Pooh has taken a vow of silence (probably for legal reasons) which means he doesn’t even get to say “Oh’ Bother” Nor does he don his famous red top or use the cork firing shotgun that the Americans lumbered him with. No, really, they did that.
And on top of the confused plot, terrible, interchangeable monsters, you also have the requisite terrible acting and there’s just something off about the dialogue as well.
I mean it’s terrible, but if you go to a cheap slasher expecting amazing dialogue and well developed character’s, then I’ll have what your having. Instead, it sounds off. Like the actors were only shown the script ten minutes before shooting started and haven’t quite memorized their lines and blocking yet which results in the whole thing sounding strange. And also, it sounds like the entire cast was taking some downers before shooting started. Possibly to help them cope with the fact that they were making a film called “Pooh: Blood and Honey.”
There’s also something mean spirited about it. I was expecting the film to have a mischievous “I can’t believe I’m getting to make this and the lawyers can’t stop me” kind of feel. Instead, it just feels mean. Couple that with the film being shot nearly completely at night- probably to hide just how terrible the make-up actually is- and It’s just unpleasant to watch.
Look, I was expecting something terrible because this film was made on a shoestring and quickly but I’ve seen great horror films made cheaply and quickly. Colin was allegedly made for £50 and that’s a solid zombie flick. Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Halloween were also cheap but they made it work for them.
Instead, the scariest thing about this film is not the confirmed sequel, that much was obvious and hopefully the increased budget will allow for masks that actually look realistic and actually move when the monster is eating, licking it’s lips or just breathing. If at the end, Pooh was demasked like a Scooby-Doo villain I wouldn’t have been surprised. Instead, the scariest thing to discover is that the ‘director’ wants to create a Copywrite Exempt Cinematic Universe (CECU) featuring Bambi and Peter Pan to start with. And who’s going to stop him? He’s copying the Blumhouse model of low cost high return for people drawn in hoping it’s going to be awful (It is but not in a fun way. I found the whole thing rather dull and padded even when I could see what was happening on screen.)
The idea of a killer Winne The Pooh is a solid one. But everything else is a lost cause. The victims need to be completely done away with -both onscreen and rewritten,- The tone needs to be changed, the monsters made less interchangeable, the kills less generic, the actors need time to rehearse their lines, blocking and to be kept off the downers.
It’s not the worst slasher I’ve ever seen- Death Rink still holds that dubious award because at least the blood doesn’t look like strawberry jam. It doesn’t look like blood, as that would require someone on this shoot to be competent but it doesn’t look like strawberry jam, which is something at least.
So go make your Copywrite Exempt Cinematic Universe Mr. Rhys Frake-Waterfield, go make your films that you write, direct, produce and edit yourself. What you’ve done is an achievement in and of itself.
But, you could have made something so much better if you’d just taken some time, put in more effort, gone further with the idea which could have worked. If you’d just put in the legwork and not been so desperate to be the first.
Because it’s the second mouse that gets the cheese.
MY SCORE – BOMB
danielsdunkings 