Mark Reviews Movies: WINNIE-THE-POOH: BLOOD AND HONEY

Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey, Premiere Entertainment

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 16, 2023

Christopher Robin does inevitably grow up, leaving behind the Hundred Acre Wood and all of his animal friends, and that's more or less what A.A. Milne tells us about Christopher and Winnie-the-Pooh and Piglet and all of the other talking beasts of that magical forest of imagination. Writer/director Rhys Frake-Waterfield offers up something of an inspired twist on that bittersweet conclusion, imagining that the animals were real, were only civilized by the boy's affection, and ultimately became feral without the company and care of their human friend. After setting up that idea, Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey reveals itself to barely be a movie.

Obviously, the gimmick here is the selling point, because people of multiple generations have grown up loving Pooh and his pals. Once Milne's original book entered into the public domain, just about any version or adaptation of the story and/or its characters was up for grabs. The idea here, as blasphemous as it may seem to those who still hold these characters and stories close to their hearts, is good enough that one hopes someone else will follow Frake-Waterfield's lead, taking this premise and running with it in better faith and with at least an ounce of skill.

A proper narrator and some sketchy animation informs us that Christopher's childhood friends were hybrid creatures, and one has to assume that means their shared other half is human. Let's not try to figure out how that might have happened, because Frake-Waterfield clearly leaves that as a gap so that his creatures can be about as low-budget as possible.

Both Pooh Bear (Craig David Dowsett) and Piglet (Chris Cordell) are simply actors walking around in second-hand clothing and wearing rubber masks. It's easy enough to tell they're made of some rubber when one of the pair's intended victims bumps into one of Piglet's ferocious, mauling tusks, only for the jagged bone to bend and wiggle with the brush of pressure. Another take or maybe a bit of editing might have corrected the moment, but one gets the sense that this movie was made by people who realized they probably had much better things to do than to care about making this movie.

The story begins with an older Christopher (Nikolai Leon) returning to the Hundred Acre Wood with his wife (played by Paula Coiz) five years after leaving the animals to go to college. The pair wander around what was once a place of playfulness and innocence, and if not for the score beating us with sinister notes and percussion, we might not know the characters believe anything is amiss. They do just kind of stroll around and speak in bored monotone, even after Pooh returns and the humans hide in a way that makes it seem as if they have entered into separate spaces entirely. The whole movie possesses that kind of haphazard form and staging, in which characters simply arrive out of or disappear into nowhere, because they're suddenly or no longer needed for whatever scene is next.

The real story follows Maria (Maria Taylor) and a magically appearing quartet of friends, who apparently exit a car that suddenly disappears as soon as they arrive at a cabin near the forest. There's a fifth friend, by the way, who gets lost along the way, finds herself face-to-rubbery-face with Pooh, and is carefully stripped of her top before being beaten and shoved into a wood chipper. Pointing out the casual misogyny of this material is necessary, if only because the general incompetence might overshadow it.

There really isn't much more that needs to be said, honestly. The friends are killed off one by one in ways that suggest severe short-term memory loss (One bikini-clad pal sees the creepy bear behind her and immediately gets back to relaxing in the hot tub) or a poor understanding of, well, everything (One victim wades through a pool, being chased by Piglet, and seems unaware that waist-deep pools can be exited—instead turning around and waiting for the monster to take a swing with its sledgehammer). When the friends' numbers dwindle enough, the screenplay brings back one character from the prologue and lets another one be summoned from whatever unknown from which most of these characters seem to have emerged.

The whole plot feels as if it's being assembled scene by scene. The violence would be gratuitous if it didn't look so cheap. For those who care about trivial things like star ratings, one might wonder why Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey receives even a sliver of a star. A big, old zero might suggest a level of notoriety or infamy that Frake-Waterfield clearly wants, and he's not getting it here.

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