Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey Film Review

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  

Child’s Play (2019) Review

“Why are you reviewing this film?”

Asked my very confused script guy.

“You’ve never seen any of the other films in this franchise, there’s no real buzz about this film, the marketing budget is zero as you’ve not seen a single trailer or even poster on even a single bus. Hell, even your local cinema couldn’t be bothered to advertise it”

True, conceded I, but you could make the same argument about Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich and that disgusting, sick little film is still riding high in my end of year top ten.

Besides, isn’t that the whole point of a reboot? To attract a new audience to a franchise? As well as ridding yourself of a sometimes suffocating amount of some frankly baffling continuity?

Besides, Aubrey Plaza is amazing in pretty much everything she does and legendary voice actor Mark Hamill (who I think also did some space wizard film back in the ’70’s- Battlestar Galactia I think it was called) is playing the role of Chucky and the child actor is pretty tolerable even if he does have to deal with supporting characters called Falyn and Pugg. For no discernible reason that I could work out.

The set-ups interesting as well- gone is the soul of a serial killer getting trapped in a doll and instead we get Skynet.

Which might sound like a bit of a course correction but in certain scenes it actually works. Given that the villain is AI instead of a trapped soul, he can control everything that’s connected to the internet of things- cameras, thermostats, driver-less cars and more which is an idea that’s really underused in modern horror.

But it all falls apart when, instead of being an evil and malevolent AI, we realize that our villain is a doll that sometimes has super-speed whenever the plot requires it and the rest of the time just sort of beams around the set.

I mean, when the death scenes to start to occur (far too late in the film for my liking I mean about an hour into a 90 minute film? Get a wiggle on). Their at their best when it’s just seemingly the technology malfunctioning. I mean, imagine it- some unseen, twisted hacker killing those who he feels have wronged him by manipulating their technology with humiliating, madness inducing and finally lethal consequences. I mean, imagine what you’ve said in front of or around your Alexa that you wouldn’t want broadcast…

In other words, the villain in this movie is scarier when he isn’t around. As when he is on set, he’s about as scary as cold pizza. And can be defeated with a good kick.

But this film has issues beyond the monster who could have been easily removed to the improvement of the film at only the cost of loosing all that lovely name recognition.

There were at least three major plot holes which would have brought about the utterly beautiful end credits even sooner and a scene at the end which just seemed to be gift wrapped for dozens of gory and inventive deaths but the film just wastes it completely in favor of a completely generic and utterly tedious ending as if the budget ran out just a smidge too soon.

The characters are all cardboard, too many of them make it to the end credits and there’s just something so old fashioned about it. I called everything that was going to happen about five minutes before it did and called the ending about two minutes in.

This film needed to develop tit’s ideas more, use it’s ideas to create a sense of looming horror from which there is no escape- as there is a great idea for a horror movie in here, hell, they even have a guy who would have been a much better villain at least until Chucky bumps him off anyway.

As a film to throw on it’s slow until it goes mad in the last half an hour, as a horror film it’s monster is scarier when he  isn’t around and it’s just utterly predictable and old fashioned, squandering what could have been a really cool, scary, idea for the sake of a brand name. It’s not completely hopeless, there were some inventive death scenes and the actors are doing what they can with what they have- especially Hamill, but it just comes across as a pointless remake that could have been a cool idea for a brand new franchise in it’s own right.

My Score- If Nothing Else