Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey is a horror thriller that follows Winnie the Pooh and Piglet enacting revenge on Christopher Robin and all mankind for abandoning them. Made for around $100,000, Blood and Honey is written, directed, and produced by Rhys Frake-Waterfield. He is already slated to do the same for the sequel. It has grossed over 4 million at the box office despite having a very limited theatrical run.
I’m not going to beat around the bush here: this is not a good movie by any means. When this movie was first announced, Aaryn and I were thrilled. We knew it probably wasn’t going to be anything great, but it had the potential to be so bad it became great. So many movies have tried to do it for a while now but it’s hard to pull off. When we saw that it was shot in only 10 days and its micro-budget, it felt like a guarantee it would land in that subgenre of movies. I would’ve gone to see it in theaters, but it was only showing at one that was over forty miles away. I like seeing movies in theaters but that was not going to happen for a movie like this.
Even before getting into the movie itself, it must be said: the expectations going in were that I’d have some fun watching and I’d get to see some cool kills. Past horror movies have shown that you don’t need a big budget to put together something that can please and scare an audience. I was not expecting a masterpiece, just anything more enjoyable than a blank screen.
My two biggest critiques of this movie come down to the low budget being very apparent and it’s just plain boring.
Making a movie is hard, especially when you’re only working with a $100,000 total. I do believe that with a bigger budget, this movie would’ve looked better, but it was not, so this is what we’re working with. The biggest culprits are the villains: Pooh and Piglet. The movie tells us that after years of neglect from Christopher Robbin, they decided to go back to their animal roots and become feral, yet they look like two dudes just found a yellow Shrek mask and a boar mask. Their actions didn’t resemble animals and the only reminder that they were was poorly dubbed animal grunts.
I feel like the movie had to cut some corners because of the budget, especially in the sound and editing departments. I can’t quite put my finger on it but the movie just sounds off. There are a handful of scenes that don’t have any music where it would be expected to and the scenes that do have music don’t use it to enhance the scene. Movies always use sounds and scores to heighten the emotions the characters are feeling for the audience, (scary scenes use unsettling violins to rattle the audience, and sad scenes use sadder slower music to make the audience feel the pain). The scores and lack of scores in pivotal scenes just did not work for me.
The movie was shot super choppy and contains way too many cuts during the action. It became really hard to follow along with a chase scene when I don’t know where they are and how close behind Pooh or Piglet are. When they do attack, it’s so hard to feel the impact. They’re also edited in ways where you can’t even tell if someone is attacked. There’s a scene towards the end where a character is being held by Pooh and then a second later, they’re decapitated. It just made no sense to me. The movie cuts to black a lot as well like they didn’t know how to transition scenes without a hard reset which is weird. It also will let shots that only need a second or two last another ten, making it feels much longer than its 84-minute run time.
All this plays into why I felt like this movie was boring. The movie itself was hard to engage with and feel invested in. For starters, there’s not really a story to follow. We have Christopher Robin who wants to visit his old friends and a group of girls supporting a friend who had a traumatic experience, but there’s nothing beyond that. With all due respect to the actors and actresses involved but there really isn’t anything memorable about any of them. I finished the movie and outside of Christopher Robin couldn’t name anyone else, (the only reason I remembered him is that he’s Christopher freaking Robin). There’s no growth, no traits that pop. It just feels like a bunch of people all gathered together to get killed.
I never felt any sort of tension because it was hard to care about the characters and Pooh and Piglet just weren’t intimidating. The movie was shot like a slasher when I really think it could’ve been better as a monster movie. Instead of them walking around, stalking the characters with knives, sledgehammers, and chains, they should’ve been hunting them down, on all fours, ripping their victims apart. Even with a weaker script and acting, that would’ve been more entertaining as opposed to what feels like just another slasher movie. To the movie’s credit, where the action lacked, the practical effects looked pretty solid. I’d say seeing the makeup for the corpses was probably the most enjoyable part of the movie.
While I didn’t enjoy this movie, I appreciated the swing. I like that someone saw the Winnie the Pooh IP become public domain and immediately decided to make a horror movie with it. With more famous characters becoming public domain, I hope people think of out-of-the-box ways to use them. This movie has been greenlit for a sequel and I think there is potential with a larger budget. I hate saying the best thing about this movie is what other movies can learn from it, but it’s true.
Final Thoughts
Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey is not for a lot of people. The movie had a lot of success given its budget, but part of me believes that’s thanks to the novelty of the idea, rather than the execution. This is a low-budget movie that really feels like a low-budget movie in the worst ways. It just wasn’t that interesting once the novelty of a murderous bear from my childhood wore off. Now that it is on VOD and will probably start streaming soon, I can think of a couple of worse ways to kill 90 minutes, but I would not be paying to see this movie if I had the choice.
