Winnie The Pooh, Blood, and Honey 2 trailer dropped on the internet in January 2024. Mother of Movies watched the original. We can tell you all about the ending. We will also introduce some classic characters in a horror movie setting. The hype surrounding the film came from notoriety rather than unabated excitement. Fans of the fairy tale storyline pushed some of the public to voice their concerns, however, Winnie the Poo Blood and Honey movie isn’t a new idea.

Some continents went ahead and banned the Winnie The Pooh horror movie in Hong Kong. Not because the reimagining of a classic storybook character pushed one too many buttons but rather, because Pooh himself has been likened to Chinese leader Xi Jinping. I’ve seen photos and it’s laughter-inducing stuff.

In any case, Winnie The Pooh, Blood and Honey is not my favorite film in this arena. It seems I need to be patient and await some filmmakers to take the topic seriously and worthy of my time. The Brothers Grim, Antlers, The Lure, Hunted and and plenty of other fairy tale-induced horror movies have ticked the right boxes. Rhys Frake-Waterfield’s films have an acquired taste. I’ve watched a couple of them like The Killing Tree, Crocodile Vengeance, and Firenado. Crocodile Vengeance was the most entertaining for me.

Winnie the Pooh Characters

The story begins with a cartoon to introduce the backstory. On the upside, this opening sequence is by far the best part of the film. The drawings swirl to action and Christopher Robin tells us how he meets a small group of animals in the 100 Mile Acres forest. Rabbit, Owl, Eeyore, and Piglet live happily together with Christopher. He decides to pursue a career as a doctor. This decision leaves the creatures to fend for themselves.

Instead of flourishing in the home they have known their whole lives, without their human counterpart their dreamy lifestyle comes crashing down. Like something drawn from the series YellowJackets, the half man half animal friends find themselves without food in the middle of Winter.

Eeyore takes one for the team and the rest of the group collaborates on who might be to blame. They decide on humans as the enemy and especially maintain Christopher Robbin is the biggest human of all. The characters swore to never talk again to save money on pesky dialogue. They also decided on an uprising against humans and hunted and tortured any they found.

Winnie The Pooh Horror Movie

Given this passable B-movie prologue sounds like a good start to a movie of this nature, once the cartoon drawing fades out, the actors faded in. The timeline flashes forward and Christopher Robin has come back to the forest with his wife. Somehow she married him but also never believed his stories about creatures in the forest. She certainly gets first-hand proof of their existence when they kill her and keep Christopher Robin around for later.

And then the film committed the cardinal sin. Any potential for a darkly lit or engaging narrative was squandered by neglecting the very elements that could have served as its saving grace. The pivotal opportunities to exploit the rich history between Christopher Robin and his companions were bypassed. Instead, the focus shifted to unconnected and unremarkable victims. The possibility of a fascinating tale of vengeance and twisted nostalgia was lost.

In the realm of cinema, anticipation often sets the stage for how good something will be. “Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey” promised a unique twist on the beloved children’s classic by taking a detour into the slasher genre. Even I, who had seen Frake-Waterfield’s previous films got swept up in the public relations commotion and the movie amassed loads of attention before its release in 2023.

Admittedly, the film packed all the cliches; from barely developed characters to less-than-stellar acting. Yet, surprisingly, these traditional flaws didn’t perturb me. The slasher genre often indulges in such characteristics, and I was ready to revel in its self-aware, absurdity. Instead, the narrative chose to tread down an all too familiar path. Scenes overstayed their welcome, with cheap money shots of compromised women being lunged at by some dude in a plastic mask. Shirts were torn off and heads were severed and shoved into mechanical traps, but this too felt empty.

The barest of threads connect the main antagonist’s character. Aside from looking like the classic Winnie the Pooh character, the only other thing tying him to his origin story is that he frequently ingests the contents of a large pot of what should have been honey but resembled hair gel at best. And don’t even get me started on the incohesive breakaway from the original prologue. If the furry-bodied forest animals were so feral, when did they learn to drive? Compounding the disappointment, technical aspects such as the pacing and editing further exacerbated the film’s failure to engage.

What might have been a deliciously twisted horror resulted in a mundane addition to the slasher collective. One that neglected the innovative potential of its concept in favor of mediocrity. It could have been a delightfully horrific adventure, a satirical masterpiece that played cleverly on its audience’s nostalgia. Instead, it became indistinguishable from the countless uninspired entries bloating the horror genre’s depths.

Winnie The Pooh, Blood and Honey is rated

1.5 Influencers bouncing on a bed out of 5

Courtesy of Umbrella Entertainment

Mother of Movies score

For a full review of the sequel Blood and Honey 2, follow this link.