For more than 40 years, spectators have lined up to see the spectacle of people being slaughtered by a psychopath with a chainsaw, a psychopath in a Halloween mask, a psychopath in a goalie mask, a psychopath with burnt skin and a striped shirt and fedora, or a psychopath with S&M nails on his face. So why not a psychopathic Winnie the Pooh?
“Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey” raised some eyebrows – otherwise often called free publicity – by having the bold audacity to take some beloved children’s characters and place them at the center of a horror film. But the idea of the feat was all there was to it. The film, made on a budget of $50,000, was too logical and inept to be a real scandal or any kind of theatrical success. (It debuted on 1,652 screens and ended up grossing a total of $1.7 million.) On paper, “Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey” looked like an excessive TikTok video, but it was amateurishly staged and poorly paced, nor scary nor funny. One measure of how uninspired it was is that the film never really lived up to its satirical hook and convinced you that you were seeing killer versions of the legendary characters created by AA Milne. In essence, you were just watching a killer in a rubber Winnie the Pooh mask who didn’t even look like Pooh. (He looked more like Christopher Cross.)
And yet, in its very existence, “Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey” introduced a brave new world where horror could reach. The rights to the Winnie the Pooh characters had belonged to the Walt Disney Firm since 1966 (back then, Disney consumed children’s classics with the same avidity that Pooh licked the inside of his honey pot). But the first of the Pooh books, published in 1926, entered the public space in the United States on January 1, 2022, and Rhys Frake-Waterfield began filming his horror curiosity just three months later.
Its grand concept reflected the kind of things you used to see in porn movies – when they riff on real movies and have titles like “Pulp Friction” and “Legally Boned.” “Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey” wasn’t pornography, but it was a form of blood-soaked exploitation cosplay. Its only real horror was revealing how easily you can reduce precious IP to trash.
I’d be a lot less cynical about all this if the “Winnie the Pooh” horror films had been made with a touch of the transgressive flair that imbues Damien Leone’s “Terrifier” films. However, they are not. Basically, they are generic horror films. You could say, as early reviewers did, that “Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey 2” is “better” than “Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey” because it got an even bigger budget and extra story . But story is what Frake-Waterfield and her screenwriter, Matt Leslie, shouldn’t be so hot about. The film definitely spreads out, with more luxurious lensing than the first film, and there’s actually a famous actor on board – traditional ham Simon Callow. Looking frightened and speaking with a Scottish accent, he explains to Christopher Robin how Winnie the Pooh and his fellow creatures acquired this behavior. It seems there was some kind of crazy doctor who kidnapped native children and infused them with animal DNA. It’s all very “Island of Lost Souls”, except this backstory completely contradicts the backstory that was suggested, imitating AA Milne’s drawings, in the first film.
There may be a lot more going on in “Blood and Honey 2,” but let’s not kid ourselves. It’s largely a mess. A year after the 100 Acre Bloodbath, everyone in the town of Ashdown blames Christopher Robin for it; they suppose he dedicated it. Why anyone would pin this crime on such a likable guy is beyond me, and the film doesn’t really pay much attention to it, other than to make it clear that Chris is now a walking trauma case. In the first film, he was played by Nikolai Leon, who was really right for the role. Now he’s played by Scott Chambers, who appears as if he’s auditioning to star in “The Ed Sheeran Story.”
This time there are more creatures, and even more chaos – more dismemberments, decapitations and face scratches, especially during the climactic rave sequence, which devastates everyone on the dance floor. Pooh (Ryan Oliva), who has been redesigned, still wears his signature overalls and red flannel shirt, but his face appears even more twisted; he now resembles a homicidal model of Jim Carrey’s Grinch. Owl (Marcus Massey) looks like someone in a real raven costume from “Eyes Large Shut” (and speaks in a voice of aristocratic mischief), and Tigger (Lewis Santer), who doesn’t appear until that rave sequence, has a face that ( without any purpose) is almost identical to Pooh’s. But he has claws that cut like knives, and his Tiggerish power might be the closest thing here to a quality tied to the legendary character.
Rhys Frake-Waterfield is, I suppose, a filmmaker, but he’s actually a British specialist who, in 2021, left his job at an energy company to package low-budget horror films. In two years, he produced 36 films with titles such as “The Loch Ness Horror”, “Snake Resort”, “Alien Invasion” and “Medusa’s Venom”. Somewhere in drive-in movie heaven, Herschell Gordon Lewis and Ed Wooden are smiling, even as Frake-Waterfield makes them look like Scorsese and Spielberg. But there’s no denying he’s a shrewd and impressive packager. He announced big plans to launch the Poohniverse, which will include films like “Pinocchio Unstrung,” “Bambi: The Reckoning” and “Poohniverse: Monsters Assembled.” I doubt the public would probably be too disturbed by this. But you can guess that the IP is shaking.