Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Jagged Edge Productions/Wikimedia Commons
Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey’s central gimmick is that it features author A.A. Milne’s beloved children’s characters as rampaging murderers. If that doesn’t sound, on the face of it, like your cup of tea, you’d do well to avoid Rhys Frake-Waterfield’s low-budget slasher, whose novel ideas don’t extend beyond that basic premise. Those who are intrigued by such a gory reimagining, on the other hand, can look forward to some of the chintziest and most uninspired exploitation cinema this side of Sharknado. It’s a lose-lose no matter which way you slice it.
Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey, which is now in theaters, only exists because Milne’s original 1926 book, Winnie-the-Pooh, entered the public domain last year. That allows anyone to adapt it without first receiving permission from Disney, who own the rights to their version of Pooh and all the supporting characters introduced in subsequent Milne books.
Thus, to avoid copyright-infringement violations, Frake-Waterfield’s Pooh doesn’t utter any of his famous exclamations (“Oh, bother!”), nor does he hang out with springy Tigger. What he does do is bludgeon, stab, and stalk his prey like a monster, which is crushingly juvenile and groan-worthy. It all renders the proceedings as drearily twisted as The Banana Splits Movie and The Mean One, two kindred spirits (the latter based on How the Grinch Stole Christmas!) that also turned popular kids properties into the stuff of nightmares.