The good news about Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey is that if you have fond memories of Winnie the Pooh from childhood, this movie probably won't ruin those memories for you, as there is not much in this movie that ties it into Winnie the Pooh, other than the names. Unfortunately, Blood and Honey needed more than just names to hold it all together, because all it is is a subpar slasher film with a killer in a Winnie the Pooh mask.
The film opens with an animated prologue, explaining that Christopher Robin befriended Owl, Piglet, Eeyore, and of course, Winnie the Pooh, in 100 Acre Wood. He was the animals' best friend, and he provided for them… until he went away to college to become a doctor. In that time, food became scarce and Pooh and Piglet resorted to eating Eeyore to survive. (Owl is never mentioned again, nor are any of the other creatures.) This apparently caused Pooh and Piglet to become feral, savage, and psychopathic.
When Christopher Robin returns five years later to introduce his new wife, Mary, to his animal friends, they are in for a rude surprise: Mary is killed almost immediately, and Christopher Robin is kidnapped and tortured. This all happens before the title sequence. The bulk of the movie is a traditional slasher film: A group of twentysomething girls head out for a weekend at a cabin adjacent to 100 Acre Wood. Pooh and Piglet hear the girls, and the killing begins.
Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey is a straightforward slasher film, and not a particularly good one. The girls are utterly forgettable and are unidentifiable outside their tropes. There is the "leader," Maria (Maria Taylor), who decided the weekend was necessary to recuperate after a terrifying experience with a stalker. The friends who come with her are not so much identifiable by name as by type. There is the girl who gets lost on the way to the cabin (she is obviously the first to be killed); the sexy social media girl; the bookish girl (the glasses are a dead giveaway); and the two lesbians. There is nothing about these girls that indicates they are tied in to Winnie the Pooh in any way. They could be chased by Jason Voorhees or Art the Clown; it doesn't matter. There is nothing about these characters that make them important to Pooh's story.
There is a lack of clarity as to Pooh and Piglet's reasoning behind their murder spree. Originally, according to the animation, they killed because they had no other food. But several times during the movie, Pooh is seen eating honey (grotesquely, I might add), so at some point he found some food. Did killing Eeyore give them a bloodlust that they couldn't quench? At no point do you see them eating any of their victims; the murders are violent, performative, and often staged. They sometimes even take victims back to 100 Acre Wood to torture.
The idea of Pooh and Piglet being humans in masks didn’t really bother me, because I could accept that they mutated during Christopher Robin’s absence. But there was nothing about them as killers that made them feel like anything other than men in masks. Piglet did have a grotesque, hog-like grunt, but other than that, he didn’t have any other pig-like qualities. Pooh didn’t have any bear qualities, either, except maybe eating honey. Pooh was big, slow, and almost completely without language. Piglet was almost as big, almost as slow, and almost as silent. There was nothing to differentiate the two killers besides Piglet’s tusks. They could have at least made Piglet significantly smaller than Pooh.
This movie lacks a sense of humor that I expected a satire of a children's property to have. The Mean One, the slasher version of The Grinch Who Stole Christmas, wasn't a particularly good movie, but it understood the assignment: It had fun, and made a lot of tongue-in-cheek references to the original. You don't get that with Blood and Honey. It's almost like director Rhys Frake-Waterfield was trying too hard to make a serious slasher film.
To that end, I will say that Frake-Waterfield succeeds as a director. The shots were well-composed, and he didn't throw in any cheap jump-scares; rather, there are a lot of "creeping slowly in the shadows" scenes that feel more meaningful than a typical slice-n-dice. The acting was fine--nothing to get excited about, but no one was cringe-worthy. Frake-Waterfield has a long list of producing credits, so it is no surprise that everything on a technical level was tight. There were some poor edits (perhaps made to keep the film at a tight 80 minutes), but I thought he did a fine job behind the camera.
I know the fascination with Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey has been high since the film was announced. Unfortunately, the Winnie the Pooh connection is very slim. The killers could be anyone in a mask and it wouldn’t matter to the story at all. It really feels like a wasted opportunity.
