Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey

The viral horror movie based on A.A. Milne's characters — and carefully working around Disney's copyright — turns Pooh and Piglet into gruesome, ...

But Blood and Honey is so straight-faced and unrelievedly grim that the audience is inevitably being set up to laugh at it instead of with it. There’s no theme to Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey, no bigger idea at work, and barely even a story. C’mon, the idea of figures as cuddly and bumbling as Pooh and Piglet turning into slaughter-monsters is inherently a bit hilarious. There’s no sense that the filmmakers behind Blood and Honey have ever read a Winnie-the-Pooh story, or have any idea what goes into one. So is the idea that kids’ fantasies have weight and meaning that outlasts childhood. Particularly during clunky moments like the one where a group of women find the words “GET OUT” scrawled in blood on the windows of their rental cabin. Frake-Waterfield leans hard into the “honey” part of Blood and Honey, with Pooh repeatedly taking breaks from the slaughter to cover his inexpressive face in dripping, sticky slime, which he sometimes drizzles over his victims as well. The acting is often stiff and the script is repetitive, but the cast uniformly pulls off screams of agony and terror convincingly as Pooh and Piglet are menacing, torturing, or killing them. The whole film has a distinctively raw “Texas Chain Saw Massacre 1974” vibe, from Pooh’s woodsy cabin filled with antlers and bones to his Leatherface-style silent, bulky menace to the focus on the grotesque. Blood and Honey does have a few things going for it, for viewers in love with practical-effects gore and classic exploitation cinema. For people who are into horror less for storytelling tension or a sense of real threat, and more because they really enjoy watching gnarly levels of human suffering, Blood and Honey has plenty of that. (Disney’s copyright over its own version of Milne’s characters remains in effect.) In the horror-movie version, Pooh and his timid friend Piglet are all grown up and have become serial killers.

Thanks, public domain! Pooh and Piglet become horror villains in 'Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey.' The 5 worst moments that'll ruin your childhood.

[the public domain](https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/movies/2022/09/01/winnie-pooh-blood-and-honey-horror-movie/7961872001/), author A.A. [How can Winnie the Pooh be made a killer? And thank goodness Disney still owns the copyright to Tigger, introduced in 1928 – for now.) The porcine one is Pooh’s enforcer and hog-ties one of the vacationing women so Pooh can crush her head with a car (the old bear has given up the ways of man but still drives) and kills another by smacking his trusty sledgehammer into her face. Of course, they’re no match for the hard-to-kill Pooh with his machete and a squadron of bees. Chris runs away, Pooh repeatedly stabs her body and the movie suddenly ends, saving some nightmare fuel for the eventual sequel. Pooh puts a blade to Maria’s throat but Christopher begs for forgiveness and to let her go. He returned five years after leaving to introduce his new wife Mary (Paula Coiz) to the animal crew, but instead they were attacked. The public domain, explained](https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/movies/2022/09/01/winnie-pooh-blood-and-honey-horror-movie/7961872001/) One of the group, Tina (May Kelly), gets lost trying to locate the place. 23](https://www.fathomevents.com/events/Winnie-the-Pooh-Blood-and-Honey)). (Owl and Rabbit are nowhere to be found after the opening, by the way. Things take a dark turn, though, when Christopher goes to college, starvation sets in during winter and Pooh, Piglet, Owl and Rabbit kill and eat their buddy Eeyore.

Oh bother, indeed. A.A. Milne's classic tale enters the public domain in the form of a horror movie with very little brains—and even less Eeyore.

There’s very little comic relief here, allowing the inherent absurdity of a killer Pooh with arbitrary super powers (that skin-cutting karate chop is seriously random) to do the humorous work. Blood And Honey is smart enough to subvert at least a couple of old slasher tropes, while leaning into two very modern ones. So to say that Winnie-The-Pooh: Blood And Honey delivers everything a slasher movie should is higher praise than it used to be. When the boy became a man and went off to college, an unprecedented winter hit the Hundred Acre Wood, causing Pooh to stave off starvation by eating Eeyore and promptly going insane. Resentful at the human who abandoned them, he and Piglet vowed never to speak again, which is sad news for anyone hoping to hear classic Pooh catchphrases after every kill. A glut of copycats watered down the formula, and many of the imitators these days deliver very little exploitation and not enough story to make up for that loss.