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.

Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey is noteworthy only for its name, as it turns out that blending slasher blood with Pooh's honey together is like oil and ...

Ultimately, to save the world that he is in and return to the future that he knows, Barry’s only hope is to race for his life. Children of the Corn, written and directed by Kurt Wimmer, opens in theaters on March 3, 2023, and will be available on Demand and digital on March 21, 2023.](/videos/children-of-the-corn-2023-official-red-band-trailer) Based on the short story by Stephen King, Children of the Corn is a chilling new re-telling for a whole new generation. Milne's beloved Winnie the Pooh children’s stories, doom and gloom is a theme that starts on the right foot. Check out the launch trailer for another look at Lara Croft in action.Tomb Raider Reloaded allows players to jump back into the boots of groundbreaking adventurer Lara Croft in an action-filled quest to obtain the ancient Scion artifact, clearing ever-changing rooms filled with new and familiar enemies as well as hazardous traps and puzzles. Nobody seems comfortable in their positions – actors underselling reactions, photographers blurring the frame, directors mixing tones like oil and vinegar – and the resulting movie is soured well beyond any sweet goodwill Pooh's honey-dripping scowl allows. Yes, the kills are approvably vicious, and they’re just about the only thing that makes this movie remotely watchable. Christopher Robin still exists, Winnie the Pooh’s crew still inhabits the 100 Acre Wood, but everything goes south when Christopher leaves for college – a smart play on Pooh seeing Christopher’s maturation as abandonment and creating a vengeful motive for his Jason Voorhees-style murder spree. [The Mean One](/articles/the-mean-one-review) or Ahockalypse, which adapted The Grinch and a Goon-style hockey story, respectively, to weak and largely unfunny horror comedies. A whimsical then wicked pencil-doodled introduction sets the grim fairytale tone in the right way and we're ready to get ridiculous… The same goes for lesser digital effects that spew animated red chunks, which naturally don’t look nearly as good as the practical guts. Continuity and composure are not this film’s friends.

In the new film Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey, AA Milne's beloved storybook bear embarks upon a murderous rampage, driven to homicidal madness by ...

[Bambi](https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/nov/28/prepare-for-bambi-on-rabies-beloved-fawn-to-become-killer-in-new-horror) and [Peter Pan](https://collider.com/peter-pan-horror-movie-adaptation-rhys-frake-waterfield/)), they will have an advantage in not needing to tiptoe around the most well-known version of the concept. (Any trash connoisseur will tell you that it’s a fine line between so-bad-it’s-good and just bad.) It’s a primal human impulse to corrupt our totems of juvenile innocence, a natural part of shedding the naivete of youth for the obscenity of the grown-up world. All of this is to say that even when purloining someone else’s idea to make a quick-and-dirty buck, expertise and effort make a difference. As explained by a prologue in crude stick-figure animation, a cold winter in the Hundred Acre Wood left Pooh and the rest of the gang with no choice but to cannibalize melancholic donkey Eeyore for survival, which marked a nightmarish surrender of all civility for a return to their basest beastly natures. A warped Pooh and Piglet, the latter wielding the savage force of 30 to 50 feral hogs, loose their unslakable hunger for carnage on a cadre of young hotties unaware that their weekend getaway to the woods is about to uphold horror-movie tradition in grisly fashion. Pooh has been made over by way of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, now a hulking, silent humanoid in a dirty pair of overalls and lumberjack flannel.

Horror is inherently a transgressive genre, with scares often achieved by taking the “safe” and rendering it “unsafe.” It makes sense that one of the ...

While the film’s music works well, the overall sound mix is a bit of a mess. The script is also full of a variety of dialogue that inches close to memorably bad camp but, yet again, stops short. It’s clear throughout that the movie’s a microbudget feature, but the “blood” of Blood and Honey is in ample supply: by and large the gore effects look good, and similarly the mask construction for Pooh and Piglet works. Unfortunately, Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey isn’t as good as the 1958 classic, but that doesn’t stop it from delivering the promise of at least some of the premise in the movie’s brief runtime. Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey is an almost perfect set-up for a horror tale. [perennial trends](https://www.inverse.com/entertainment/m3gan-review-blumhouse) is specifically the transmogrification of childhood elements into sources of horror, from dangerous dolls (Child’s Play, Annabelle) and imaginary friends (Daniel Isn’t Real), to even mothers (The Babadook) and children themselves (Children of the Corn, Sinister).

When Superman enters the public domain in 2033, Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey director Rhys Frake-Waterfield may be ready to put his own dark spin on the ...

[Superman](https://www.denofgeek.com/superman) and [Batman](https://www.denofgeek.com/batman)!” the director admits to Den of Geek. But all of these stories happen through the control of DC Comics and its parent-company Warner Bros., which either approves official versions of bad Superman or forces competitors to create their own legally-distinct imitators. There’s no doubt he could do the same with a nasty Superman story, whether or not Warner Bros.—or anyone else—likes it. Anything that wasn’t in the story is still property of Warner Bros. And, of course, Zack Snyder couldn’t resist making Superman bad, first when he was resurrected and then in the “Knightmare” epilogue to [Zack Snyder’s Justice League](https://www.denofgeek.com/justice-league). [Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey](https://www.denofgeek.com/movies/how-winnie-the-pooh-blood-and-honey-horror-movie-exists/) offers a compelling look at the future of storytelling. Of course evil Superman stories have been done before. And in 10 years, one of the most important characters from Disney’s biggest competitor become public domain, the Man of Steel himself. Frake-Waterfield has already indicated that he plans to keep working with public domain characters, including not only Pooh but also Bambi and Peter Pan. Each year, new characters join in the public domain, including Mickey Mouse next year. For decades, the Walt Disney Corporation has controlled stories about Pooh and the gang from the Hundred Acre Wood, overtaking in the public consciousness even depictions by the characters’ creators A.A.

'Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey' is the horror movie nobody asked for, and only exists thanks to its source material entering the public domain.

When the screaming is over, you realize that the grotesque Pooh and Piglet masks are the only memorable part of what you’ve experienced, as if the movie was a thin conceit to show off a Comic-Con couples costume. Pooh and a tusked, ogreish Piglet then abduct and imprison Robin in a treehouse where Pooh whips him with the detachable tail that belonged to Eeyore, presumably deceased as well. Before the credits mercifully arrive, we are treated to the deaths of brand-new characters who stumble into the fray, including one man with the sorriest fake British accent ever attempted in the name of cinema, and Christopher Robin begging Pooh to stop his homicidal rampage. If so, we are barely given the opportunity to imagine one: Blood and Honey is heavy on the splatter and hostile to plot, with its chief antagonist quickly becoming the kind of indestructible goliath who operates as a drab imitation of Blood and Honey is a hundred-acre wasteland, a witless gory bore, and in the end, you’re just depressed that anyone spent time working on it. [horror](https://www.rollingstone.com/t/horror/) [film](https://www.rollingstone.com/t/movies/) that makes feral killers out of the cuddly [animals](https://www.rollingstone.com/t/animals/) from beloved children’s books, you hope for some entertaining grindhouse slasher.