Tuesday, October 24, 2023

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

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