Like a butterfly flapping its wings and causing a hurricane on the other side of the globe, it's sometimes hard to not get caught up in the imaginary what-if's of history. What if Archduke Franz Ferdinand had driven a different route? What if Charles Manson's great-great-grandparents had never met? And what if Winnie-the-Pooh author A.A. Milne had gone to bed with a tummy ache the night he dreamt up his tender-hearted teddy bear protagonist, so instead of sweet dreams he had instead been roiled by terrible visions of a gigantic yellow mutant monster clawing the faces off of social media influencers as they soaked in a hot tub?
That appears to have been the question that kept Firenado writer/director and mean meme instigator Rhys Frake-Waterfield up at night. It eventually birthed Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey, the viral trailer(opens in a new tab) turned full-length slasher flick that is now playing in theaters. And that, well, that only birthed all kinds of questions from there.
How the hunny-bear heck does something like this happen?
First, let us rewind. "Winnie-the-Pooh" was introduced to the world in the year 1924 in a collection of Milne's poetry called When We Were Very Young. The specific poem was titled "Teddy Bear," while the character therein was at that point called "Mr. Edward Bear" after what Milness young son, Christopher Robin Milne, called his own stuffed bear.
That book's illustrator E. H. Shepard was integral to what came next, as he was the one who convinced Milne that he should write an entire book of stories based around his son's beloved toy menagerie. Milne did, and the book Winnie-the-Pooh – the new name coming from(opens in a new tab) the mashing together of real-life Christopher Robin's favorite bear at the zoo with a friend's pet swan – landed two years later. It became an immediate success with both critics and critical children alike.
Most of us probably know what came after that. Books and toys and Walt Disney movies, oh my. Generation after generation of children and their children's children steeped in the almighty lore of the Hundred Acre Wood and its cheerful (save Eeyore) inhabitants. The boy Christopher Robin, the half-shirt-wearing Pooh bear, and his best bud, the worrywart Piglet. Eeyore's pin-on tail. Tiggers and Heffalumps and Kangas and Roos. A full 95 years of kiddie indoctrination on the concepts of kindness and civility and really, really loving honey.
95 is the magic number in today's tale, because that's how many years it takes for a work of art to enter the public domain. And once a work of art is in the public domain, all bets are off — now it's everybody's property to do with as they like. (And please do check back in on Mickey Mouse in a couple of years.) Then, before you know it, some fresh upstart named Rhys Frake-Waterfield is turning your kid's much-beloved teddy bear into a drooling serial killer in crusty overalls, haunting the woods with a sledgehammer in paw.
Within just a few short weeks of Pooh's lapse into public domain life, the crafty writer/director was already in post-production on his low-budget retelling, which sees Pooh and the Gang going feral after Christopher Robin heads off to college. You know how you thought the Toy Story movies got real dark when they put all of Andy's toy friends on that conveyor belt into the incinerator? Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey imagines things that would land that dandy Andy in the psych ward. Starting off with an amusing animated prologue which sees the starving poppets straight up cannibalizing Eeyore, things only go stark raving madder with blood lust from there.
So, is Blood and Honey worth the defilement of your childhood loves?
The movies that Frake-Waterfield has mentioned in interviews as his inspirations will probably give you all of the information you need on what to expect here. A child of the aughts era of "Bro Horror" (think Eli Roth and Rob Zombie), he's name-checked Wrong Turn(opens in a new tab), the 2003 remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre(opens in a new tab), and Halloween and Halloween Kills — including Zombie's grim entries into the Halloween franchise, of which he said(opens in a new tab), "I like the brutal side to them."
The ugly nihilism and misogyny of those movies is slathered all over Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey in great, sick-making dollops. Incongruously, for a movie that involves a gigantic yellow bear with a dopey perma-grin planted on its face, this thing takes itself deathly seriously. The film brandishes a snarling posture that nearly snuffs out all of the fun that we are supposed to be having. (I think my audience laughed twice during the entire thing.)
Winnie-the-Pooh begins with Maria (Maria Taylor), a young woman in recovery after a perverted stalker broke into her home and tried to molest her in her bed one night; a flashback shows this attack in as much lurid, close-up detail as possible. Naturally, the film sends Maria and some girlfriends out to ye olde cabin in the woods. And when has that ever gone wrong in a horror movie? This just happens to be a cabin in the Hundred Acre Woods, unfortunately for them. And unfortunate for us, as this is one of those movies that seems more concerned with having its actresses' breasts in the frame than it is their faces.
Every character here is nothing more than a sketch of a sketch. One of the lines that got a laugh from my theater was when we find out two of these women are actually a lesbian couple going through a rough patch, and it only got the laugh because that revelation dropped out of literal nowhere. Disney's cartoon drawings had more character in one swoop of pencil line than any of these women are given before they start getting their faces mashed into wood chippers and their tops torn off.
That said, thin characterization can be par for the course when it comes to low-budget slashers. After all, we're here for the violence, are we not? So, what of those kills? That's what brings the boys to Pooh's yard, after all. And there are some gnarly ones here to be sure. Frake-Waterfield supposedly got a budget boost(opens in a new tab) to re-shoot some stuff once the film's trailer went viral, and you can see where the money went: straight into that wood chipper! Heads popping under car tires and machetes stabbed through mouths play out like a Greatest Hits playlist of slasher slashings. But, all of this begs one big question…
Where the hell is the Pooh of it all?
Not a lot of effort seems to have been made into integrating specific pieces of Pooh lore into any of this violence. Why does Piglet wield chains? Why does the aged sign to the Hundred Acre Wood look like permanent marker scrawled on cardboard? All of it makes one wonder why (beyond the viral factor, of course) this story is even about our favorite condiment-obsessed bear this side of Paddington. These Spirit Halloween-masked killers could have just as well been the stars of a dire Hatchet flick. We watch Pooh eat a lot of honey, sure, but how are you gonna turn Winne-the-Pooh into a serial killer and not show him kill anybody with a honey pot, goshdarnit? With all of the weird possibilities they could have exploited and funny avenues they could have gone down with this material, why am I watching a group of women be exploited and humiliated?
There are two moments of note that do riff on the formal Pooh lore we all know and love, referencing 1) Eeyore's aforementioned detachable tail and 2) a swarm of killer bees beckoned at Pooh's command. But any joy we might've eked out from getting a taste of what we came here for is rendered incomprehensible by incoherent filmmaking and the low budget. With shots frequently obscured by darkness or sloppy camera work, we can't really even tell what we're looking at when it matters the most. Plus, the film's own mythology is as half-assed as a bear with no pants on.
What childhood horrors might the public domain unleash upon us next?
Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey has already made its money and then some back from its release in Mexico(opens in a new tab) earlier this year. So, a sequel is as certain as a Tigger likes to bounce. One does hope against hope that at least some of the inevitable bigger budget will involve actual work on story and characters and not just bigger, more elaborate gore effects. But even if the budget goes straight to pricier Pooh masks, let's hope that a Blood and Honey Part 2: The Re-Honeying will at least better incorporate some of the more memorable details from Milne's books. I personally would be happy if a Zombie Eeyore rises from the grave and unleashes hell on the Hundred Acres, but then he always was my favorite character. (Born a critic, die a critic!)
Frake-Waterfield has repeatedly floated the idea(opens in a new tab) of an entire multiverse of children's stories turned into horror — a kind of inverse of what happened to the Brothers Grimm stories back in the day. He's a producer on Bambi: The Reckoning, which sounds like Pooh Redux: The baby deer mutates and goes on a killing spree. But Peter Pan's Neverland Nightmare, which he's slated to direct, could be interesting; it sounds like a spin on A Nightmare on Elm Street, with dream and fantasy logic possibly taking center stage. Well, as long as it's not 90 long minutes of Wendy running topless away from horny pirates, it could only be an improvement on what Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey had hidden away in its big dumb pot.
Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey is now in theaters.
