Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey (2023)
Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.
Minutes after the original source material entered the public domain, production began on Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey. According to the film, the once friendly animals inhabiting the 100 Acre Woods fell on dark times after Christopher Robin went off to college and left them behind. During the following winter, the animals became so desperate for food that they killed and ate Eeyore, which turned them back into feral killing machines with a hatred for all humanity, especially one Christopher Robin.
Not long thereafter we meet a group of college-aged girls having a fun-filled weekend in those same woods. It doesn’t take long for Pooh and Piglet to sniff out these uninvited guests and have them for dinner… and I don’t mean as guests. Only one of the girls has any sort of back story, and they’re all interchangeable. Even if you wanted to tell them apart, you couldn’t.
Then again, that’s not who the audience is rooting for. After one of the girls is abducted from the hot tub, she quickly finds herself hog-tied (no pun intended) in the driveway. After Piglet gives the signal, Pooh inches forward in a Dodge Charger until the front wheel slowly rolls over her skull, sending her brains in one direction and her eyeballs in the other. Of course there’s no rest for the wicked, and in a series of murders that would make Michael Myers jealous, Piglet (armed with his trusty sledgehammer) and Pooh (a fan of knives) chase, torture, and slaughter most everyone they come across. And while I don’t think we’re supposed to be rooting for the killers, it’s hard to feel sorry for the humans when they’re all so dumb. When three of the girls run up on Pooh killing one of their friends, they stick around for several minutes to watch the action instead of running in the other direction. In another scene, two of the girls sitting inside a car with the keys in the ignition watch a five minute brawl before deciding it might be a good time to drive away. Imagine what actions you might take if two creatures showed up to kill you and your friends. Everybody in the film consistently does the opposite of what you just thought of.
Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey ventures into the realm of torture porn. There’s no real plot and nobody worth rooting for. Even when Jason or Freddy slice their way through a film, somebody somewhere is planning a counter attack. Not here. The closest Pooh comes to meeting his match is in the form of a random hippy armed with a crowbar, who unfortunately gets his face karate-chopped off. The film desperately could have used more humor and camp and a little less blood; I doubt that’s what we’ll get in the sequel, which is already being teased with a 2024 release date.