‘Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey‘ Is a Torture-Porn Travesty

At the outset of Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey, an independent horror film that makes feral killers out of the cuddly animals from beloved children’s books, you hope for some entertaining grindhouse slasher. Two minutes in, you’re reduced to praying that it’s “so bad it’s good.” And by the time Pooh shoves a woman into a woodchipper, her legs still flailing as she’s butchered, you have to admit there’s no redeeming this hack job. Blood and Honey is a hundred-acre wasteland, a witless gory bore, and in the end, you’re just depressed that anyone spent time working on it. Oh, bother.

Might there be a worthwhile story in which Pooh and Piglet, all grown up and demonic, stalk and murder trespassers in their woodland home? If so, we are barely given the opportunity to imagine one: Blood and Honey is heavy on the splatter and hostile to plot, with its chief antagonist quickly becoming the kind of indestructible goliath who operates as a drab imitation of Halloween’s Michael Myers. When the movie first garnered viral interest for its gimmick — screenwriter and debut director Rhys Frake-Waterfield began production as soon as the rights to Winnie-the-Pooh entered public domain in 2022 — the possibilities were substantially broader. Perhaps it would explore the lingering psychic wounds of childhood? Could it play against our cravings for nostalgia and comforting fantasy? Or at least wickedly satirize its own plunder of existing intellectual property? Nope, nope, and nope again. Most disappointing of all, Frake-Waterfield appears to have only a passing interest in the wholesome canon he’s trying to pervert. While too much fan service is annoying, no mention of Tigger feels like a grievous oversight.   

But, to the action, or as much as can be followed in this haphazardly edited nightmare: Christopher Robin, now an adult, returns with his girlfriend to the forest where he enjoyed his innocent youth with a menagerie of friendly talking animals. He seems to regret abandoning them in the wilderness — as if rabbits and owls aren’t perfectly at home there. Robin has only begun to explain this when a lumberjack version of Pooh shows up to murder his companion, who had wisely pointed out that they needn’t be wandering around a part of the countryside that resembles a Brothers Grimm illustration by way of The Blair Witch Project. RIP. Pooh and a tusked, ogreish Piglet then abduct and imprison Robin in a treehouse where Pooh whips him with the detachable tail that belonged to Eeyore, presumably deceased as well. This is about as far as we get with references to the source material. 

Meanwhile, in the same foreboding vicinity, several young women arrive at a cabin they’ve rented for a girls’ getaway. One of them is recovering from trauma of some kind, but between the murky sound mixing (you’ll want subtitles) and laughably undistinguished characters (hard to say if some of these ladies even had names), you won’t remember or care who is dealing with what.

Suffice to say, this ensemble accelerates the bizarre misogyny that turns out to be the dominant theme of Blood and Honey. While you can always expect to see women impaled and dismembered in a slasher flick, Piglet and Pooh dispatch these nearly identical coeds with a grim resolve that fails to provoke shock, fear or the slightest trace of evil amusement, even while their methods reach torture-porn extremes. Obviously, the slut taking bikini selfies in the hot tub will have to pay the ultimate price for this behavior, yet the sight of Piglet pinning her down so Pooh can drive a car forward and crush her head underneath the front wheel is curiously inert. Maybe it’s that they have zero motivation for this killing spree in the first place. Maybe it’s that the victim is so underwritten as to be functionally dead already.    

Funny that a low-budget entertainment whose entire appeal lies in the premise struggles for conceptual traction, though “struggle” imparts more of an effort than is provable here. Instead, we careen among half-assed ideas: Pooh apparently now commands a squad of vicious CGI honeybees… for one or two scenes. There is a vague suggestion that he and Piglet became hunters in order to feed themselves, but they don’t eat their prey. Nobody figures out a way of learning who or what is perpetrating this massacre — at least let them find a book with some answers! — so we never gain any perspective on the lore supposedly fueling the relentless violence.

Blood and Honey leaves itself with no mechanism for developing and heightening tension, its repetitive beats turning a scant 84-minute runtime into a grueling slog toward a rushed, anticlimactic finale. Before the credits mercifully arrive, we are treated to the deaths of brand-new characters who stumble into the fray, including one man with the sorriest fake British accent ever attempted in the name of cinema, and Christopher Robin begging Pooh to stop his homicidal rampage. He does not. When the screaming is over, you realize that the grotesque Pooh and Piglet masks are the only memorable part of what you’ve experienced, as if the movie was a thin conceit to show off a Comic-Con couples costume.

Schlock, when properly assembled, is a true joy. Rolling in the mud, to strike a piggy metaphor, can be cathartic. But without an identifiable sense of humor, camp, mischief or irony, all that’s left is bad taste. The abject seriousness of Blood and Honey is its undoing, and what marks it as a bitter exercise in stunt marketing. For a while, you can’t help laughing reflexively at this movie, anticipating the moment when it will demonstrate sly self-awareness and earn your affection. Sadly, the waiting goes on till you lapse into a numb silence, wondering why the monsterfication of a sweet teddy bear can’t elevate the dreck you’re watching. Of course, you really shouldn’t expect more from an artistic vision based in copyright law.