Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey
If you go down to the woods today... you're sure of a big surprise - not to mention some shock horror.
The biggest shock, however, will be one of incredulity as to why writer-director Rhys Frake-Waterfield has taken A.A. Milne's delightful nursery characters and turned them into raving maniacs on a flesh-eating rampage. Well, children, it’s because dear Mr Milne’s Winnie the Pooh stories recently came out of copyright, so they are up for grabs by anybody who wishes to exploit them further. Luckily those nice people at Disney still hold on to the animation rights.
The explanation as to why Pooh and Piglet should have become latter-day Leatherfaces in hideous masks as in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is because their friend, young Christopher Robin, had abandoned his pals in the Hundred Acre Wood, leaving them to fend for themselves in deepest winter. Failing to find any nourishment, Pooh and Piglet began devouring their other animal friends, including Eeyore the pessimistic donkey. One assumes that Owl, Tigger, Kanga and Roo also went the same way of all flesh.
When the adult Christopher (Nikolai Leon) arrives back with his fiancée Mary (Paula Coiz) expecting to find his old pals once again, he gets captured and Mary is murdered. So much for the opening of what once was a children’s story. In another part of the wood, Maria (Maria Taylor) is trying to avoid a stalker, so she heads off with four other girlfriends in an effort to find some peace. Why they would pick a strange house in the middle of a wood for a holiday home is one of those questions that only the makers of horror films can really answer – it’s part of the territory of the genre. That and the fact that the girls shut off their phones so as not to be bothered by potential callers while they are enjoying a quiet weekend in the country. Little did they know...
At the risk of giving away spoilers, it is easier to say matters get much worse when a sixth friend Tina (May Kelly) arrives to join the other girls including potential couple Alice and Zoe (Amber Doig-Thorn and Danielle Ronald) but, gosh, Piglet gets there first, literally making a meal of her, and then with Pooh goes off to find the rest of the holidaymakers. It’s all rubbish, of course, badly written, without any real thrills and the poor benighted cast are just left reacting to the so-called horrors, saying lines like “We used to be friends”, “What happened to you?” and “We can't stay here, Alice...”
However, if you take Pooh and Piglet out of the equation, Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey is just another bog-standard stalk-and-slash horror flick, or should that be hog-standard... Beware, however, because a sequel is on its way. There’s obviously no accounting for bad taste.
MICHAEL DARVELL
Cast: Nikolai Leon, Craig David Dowsett, Chris Cordell, Paula Coiz, Maria Taylor, Natasha Rose Mills, Amber Doig-Thorne, Danielle Ronald, Natasha Tosini, May Kelly, Danielle Scott.
Dir Rhys Frake-Waterfield, Pro Rhys Frake-Waterfield and Scott Jeffrey, Screenplay Rhys Frake-Waterfield, Ph Vince Knight, Ed Rhys Frake-Waterfield, Music Clejan, Animation Seb Cox, Sound Ryan Hatton and Nicola Itro.
Jagged Edge Productions/ITN Distribution-Altitude Film Entertainment.
84 mins. UK. 2023. UK Rel: 17 March 2023. US Rel: 15 February 2023. Cert 18.
