Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey Parent Guide

When he was a boy, Christopher Robin (Nikolai Leon) made some unlikely friends in the Hundred Acre Wood near his home – a group of mutants, part animal, part human, all creepy. But the child saw past their horrifying appearance, fed them, and treated them like friends.

Now that Christopher Robin is away at college, the animals learn that the Hundred Acre Wood doesn’t provide nearly enough food to sustain five large creatures. Swearing revenge on the boy who abandoned them, the animals eat one of their own and vow never to speak again, reverting to mute, violent beasts.

When Christopher Robin returns, excited to see his old friends and introduce them to his wife Mary (Paula Coiz), he finds instead a camp of horrifying murderers. But he’s not the only one who’s facing the ghosts of his past, because Maria (Maria Taylor) and a group of her friends have just rented a house by the woods for a getaway. They are not prepared for the kind of welcome Winnie the Pooh (Craig David Dowsett) is going to give them.

You can tell when the copyright expired and Winnie the Pooh entered public domain, because it’s a safe bet that the A.A. Milne estate didn’t sign off on this, and neither did Disney. This script is absolutely brutal, and I don’t mean violent. It feels like it was written by a cheap algorithm in a foreign language and then bashed through Google translate, slapped in front of the actors, and shot without further editing or adjustment. The characters don’t even make any pretense of acting like human beings: they’re autonomous death-seeking units. You can be sure that if there’s a bad, weird, or improbable decision to be made, they’ll make it.

You might think that this unusual behaviour would make the film more interesting, but it doesn’t. Since the characters almost universally make the worst available choice, the film is monotonously predictable, and the premise has been rehashed so many times that you know exactly what happens next anyway. Sure, it’s all dolled up in a childhood-destroying Winnie the Pooh drag, but this is just another bland slasher movie. It doesn’t even manage to find creative ways to murder its irritating characters, which is a real bummer. All horror fans have seen someone take a sledgehammer to the head before, so you’re going to need to try harder than that to get a reaction out of me.

I don’t think any of us are under the illusion that this film would be suitable for young audiences. The frequent gruesome violence, profanity, and pointless nudity make it a real loser for a younger demographic, and I’m not sure it’s going to find an audience with most adults either. Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey seems to be bad on purpose, and I’m not sure how you’re supposed to find the fun in it. In deliberately trying to make a cult classic, the filmmakers have mostly just made a mess with terrible costumes, dreadful acting, and a script which would shame a high school creative writing class. Cult classics are born, not deliberately manufactured.