My Review of Winnie The Pooh: Blood And Honey 2 (2024)

 

Written by Rhys Frake-Waterfield And Matt Leslie

Directed by Rhys Frake-Waterfield

Pooh: "Oh, bother!"

If there's one thing that I've really learned when it comes to certain things, the power of hate watching a thing can easily backfire. By all means, the previous installment of The Twisted Childhood Universe should've been a failure but it wasn't and we got this sequel with more to come.

Okay, to be honest while the first movie was objectively bad in every conceivable way for a horror movie, it was weirdly fascinating. This second movie however managed to upgrade itself from awful to surprisingly decent. Yeah, I can't believe it.

I don't know if it had something to do with replacing the majority of the original cast from the first movie or the fact that the script for this one actually tried to make you care for the characters. Either way, it's a step in the right direction.

Last time we saw Christopher Robin (Scott Chambers), his fiancée was killed, he had been tortured in a kinky BDSM session with his childhood pals and some random characters got killed in front of him. Not surprising enough, he's become a bit of a local pariah while attending therapy sessions to unlock childhood trauma, including what happened to his twin brother, Billy (Peter DeSouza-Feighoney). 

While his local townspeople might mistrust him and the very hospital where proved to actually be good at his job fired him, Christopher had a big support system. Both his parents Alan (Alec Newman) and Daphne (Nicola Wright) were there for him, his sister Bunny (Thea Evans) wanted to connect with him and he had friends like Lexy (Tallulah Evans) and Finn (Flynn Matthews) who were on his side.

On the down side, there was also the returns of Pooh (Ryan Oliva), Piglet (Eddie McKenzie), Tigger (Lewis Santer) and Owl (Marcus Massey) and they didn't waste time killing and mutilating anyone they could in order to get their revenge on Christopher. Between movies their hatred for their former human friend certainly grew.

In this movie, not only did the goriness get upped along with the emotional stakes and more personal losses but there was an effort to make Christopher a more competent protagonist. There was also a more scientific explanation for the reason why Christopher's friends were the way are along with the very real promise that death wouldn't be a deterrent for them. The scientific was where the character Cavendish (Simon Callow) briefly factored in but it's a fairly wasted role. 

- Most of the actors from the first movie did appear as a movie that the kid Lexy was babysitting had watched. 

- Scott Chambers who replaced Nikolai Leon as Christopher Robin was a producer on the first movie. He's also co-writing future instalments for this franchise.

- The next movies will be Bambi: The Reckoning and Peter Pan's Neverland Nightmare. Both have yet to be given official release dates.

- Chronology: About a year since the events of the first movie in the town of Ashdown.

Winnie The Pooh: Blood And Honey 2 turned out to be a surprising improvement on its very awful first movie. It's by no means brilliant, but it's definitely a move in the right direction with a seemingly conscious effort to do better with this childhood horror franchise.

Rating: 6 out of 10 

My Review of Winnie The Pooh: Blood And Honey (2023)

 

Written And Directed by Rhys Frake-Waterfield

Christopher: "Pooh, please stop this! Take me instead! Why are you doing this?"

Pooh: "You left."

I swore months ago that I was never going to watch this film and yesterday, out of boredom, I broke said promise and caved in. If there was an award for strangest movie experience in this year, it would go this film.

With Winnie The Pooh now in the public domain, it didn't take long for this horror themed version to surface and to be honest, it does look as cheaply shot as the trailer indicated. It's also something else.

The movie's strength is it's weak willed and cowardly protagonist Christopher Robin (Nikolai Leon). As a kid, he befriended the creatures of 100 Acre Woods. Then he grew up, forgot his friends, went to college, trained to be a doctor and got himself a wife named Mary (Paula Coiz).

Returning to his childhood sanctuary, Christopher learned that things had changed for the worst. Notably that his former friends Winnie the Pooh (Craig David Dowsett) and Piglet (Chris Cordell) had abandoned their love for humanity and went feral with poor Eeyore being one of their first victims.

The return of Christopher only enraged the feral pair and they wasted no time brutally killing Mary and keeping Christopher as a tied up plaything that Pooh took too much pleasure in torturing. It's the focus on the feral duo and Christopher and that broken friendship were the movie worked the best.

What didn't work were the addition of a group of women who's only sole purpose were to be killed off, one by one and quite harshly too. There's an attempt to flesh some of them out as characters (lesbian couple, woman dealing with a stalker, etc) but if anything, they bog the story down. 

It's the scenes with Pooh and Christopher at the end though that ended the movie on a clear sequel set up. A sequel that's currently filming but as good as the acting was from Nikolai Leon, Christopher might be a cute Final Guy but he's definitely one that needs to be better tackled in the sequel. Still better than the female characters in this movie.

- They used animation decently in some flashbacks I'll admit. Pooh and Piglet however just looked like blokes in masks.

- Christopher literally got whipped with Eeyore's tail in a scene that was as BDSM as you can get in a non Hellraiser movie.

- Tigger was supposed to appear in this movie but will be in the sequel with Owl and several recasts.

- Chronology: I'm assuming 2023 for the majority of the movie.

Okay, I'll admit that I didn't hate Winnie The Pooh: Blood And Honey as much as I thought. I mean, it's still pretty bad but oddly fascinating and if they just had just scrapped the secondary plot, I think a better movie would've emerged. 

Rating: 5 out of 10