Have you heard that joke levelled at films that take a funny, novel premise and stretch it out far beyond the life cycle of the gag that goes ‘This is why SNL sketches are five minutes long’? Few films have ever earned that jab more than Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey. From the outside we all thought it was hilarious, a beloved character and national treasure succumbing to every IP-devouring studio’s worst nightmare: copyright expiration. The trailer was a viral hit, we all gawked at the sight of two fat men wearing a bear and a pig mask seemingly ordered from wish.com that were somehow supposed to be Winnie and Piglet and saw them terrorise some women in a forest, and oh how we laughed for all three minutes of its runtime. But the real horror came when director and writer Rhys Frake-Waterfield presumably came to the realisation, ‘Oh bother, how do I make an 84 minute film out of this?’
We all know what followed. A critical massacre that was more vicious than any of the film’s contents, the lowest rated film of 2023 according to IMDb, Letterboxd, Metacritic, and if that wasn’t enough, it was all topped off with one of the most prestigious accolades in all of cinema; a clean sweep at the Razzies, including worst picture.
But that’s not the whole story. Reportedly, off an absolutely miniscule budget of $50,000 the film managed to make over $5,000,000 in cinemas, making this one of the most profitable films in relation to budget in recent memory. At a time when it feels like there is an increased sense of dissonance between critical consensus and commercial success, Blood and Honey seemed to prove that argument in the most extreme terms.
A sequel being greenlit, put into production, and now released to the public all in the span of 15 all too brief months shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone who’s dug around into the background of Jagged Edge Productions. A British production company established in 2020, they specialise in the world of direct-to-streaming films that many people are unaware actually make up a huge bedrock of the streaming landscape in this country. Anybody who’s ever had the misfortune to scroll on the sci-fi or horror section on Amazon Prime long enough to start getting suggested works like The Curse of Humpty Dumpty, Snake Hotel, or Easter Bunny Massacre: The Bloody Trail can thank Jagged Edge for a large portion of those. Where we’re used to seeing budgets and box office numbers that deal in the tens or hundreds of millions, there are many companies like this that scale it way back to the thousands. Tiny budgets for comparatively tiny profits, and boy does it show in the final product. The rate at which these are made is honestly staggering, in 2021 alone they released 13 films, 2022 that increased to 18, with Frake-Waterfield involved in most of them. So despite having a biblically poor batting average, a singular success like Blood and Honey is all they needed to go big.
Newly minted award winner Rhys Frake-Waterfield is back in the writer/director chair for this outing. After his near brush with death in the Hundred Acre Wood, Christopher Robin is still haunted by the events of the last film. While he’s trying to forget his traumatic experience- in fact maybe trying a little too hard as his fiancée who was strangled to death by Piglet is never mentioned at all in this film- the town of Ashdown doesn’t believe his tales of killer man-creatures and instead think he was the killer all along. This takes the form of Christopher having MURDERER graffitied on his car, losing his job as a junior doctor because of public pressure, and… err, did I mention they graffitied his car? He tries to cope with this by going to therapy where it’s revealed he has an unrelated secondary layer of trauma as a child when he witnessed his brother being kidnapped at a birthday party, which Cristopher now feels compelled to solve and surely has nothing to do with Pooh and his friends. Speaking of which, Pooh is back and has now recruited the help of Owl and Tigger to go about his next spree of wanton death and destruction.
What’s immediately obvious is that Frake-Waterfield and co seem to be actually trying this time, or at the very least are putting in a single brain cell of effort here compared to the previous film. Proof of the first brain cell being that he’s made the creative leap to actually feature Christopher Robin as the main character this time instead of a cameo (let’s not act like that was the most obvious route possible to anyone hearing this premise). Here Christopher Robin has been recast from Nikolai Leon (I can’t imagine how much of a blow that must have been for him to have not even made it to the Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey sequel), this time being played by Scott Chambers. He gives a much more hearty performance, aided by his naturally boyish face and youthful looks that effectively play into a man who is haunted by his childhood. Although the recast might have been aided by the fact that Chambers is also a prolific figure in this direct-to-streaming ring, him being the producer of an utterly staggering 118 films in the past eight years (welcome back Roger Corman?) Here he’s a triple threat, serving as actor, producer, and editor. The story here tries to make use of Christopher, sowing the seeds of a Laurie Strode/Michael Myers-type symbiosis in how he and Pooh are far more alike than he would care to admit, both becoming ostracised by their communities. Does this idea go anywhere? No, not really, but there is a semblance of acknowledgement that the last film’s approach was not the right one.
In fact one of the most interesting features of this film is that technically this isn’t actually a sequel, but actually a sort of meta-textual followup to the last one. Since the Hundred Acre Woods Massacre a film has been made exploiting the tragedy, conveniently titled Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey. It’s not just the title that’s familiar, a trailer for the film plays on a TV at one point and it’s the exact same film, unchanged- well, aside from an added line where Winnie says “It’s Pooh’n time!”- all to thundering silence in the cinema. While not a Scream 2-style framing device of the previous instalment becoming a movie in the next film’s universe, it’s not quite a Halloween III: Season of the Witch throwaway gag either. Making Blood and Honey I text means the filmmakers can get away with certain retcons like recasting Christopher and redesigning the creatures from their abysmal masks and overalls.
… there’s a larger pool of slasher fans who might find at least a slither of enjoyment in the gore, the Winnie the Pooh community will be sleeping soundly knowing that no number of head-splatters or boob shots are yet to even slightly tarnish his reputation.
But perhaps more tellingly, this backtracking feels like Frake-Waterfield is actually trying to take a proper stab at this story. The jokes are scaled back noticeably here, clearly trying to appeal to traditional slasher fans more than just people here for the meme, once again underlining the added effort to make this one more than just a commercially driven ‘so bad it’s good’ cult classic. Many of us felt duped by the last movie for having a promising intro featuring an animated prologue about the animals being left to starve after Christopher Robin went away and how they resorted to cannibalising poor Eeyore. This felt like the single moment that this film actually warranted being a sacrilegious rehash of A.A. Milne’s original story- cos let’s be real here, if any of the friends are going to get the short straw and be killed for meat, it’s obviously going to be Eeyore. But after a brief scene where Christopher gets kidnapped by Pooh and Piglet, the film then devolves into a generic home invasion horror featuring a group of young women completely unrelated to Winnie the Pooh getting picked off one by one and being featured in various states of undress, before Christopher makes a comeback five minutes before the end.
Once again, anybody familiar with these kinds of films knows the score here. These films entice you with a wild title and a poster to match; Don’t Speak, about aliens who see with their ears (alternately titled Silent Place), or Freddy’s Fridays, about a restaurant featuring haunted animatronics. Then anyone gullible and/or bored enough to hit play is treated with to a sadistic amount of dialogue scenes acting as padding to help these films limp past the feature length mark before featuring about a minute’s worth of sloppily put together set pieces that pale in execution compared to the poster, roll credits, cue Dinosaur Hotel 3 on autoplay. Perhaps it’s still a cynical decision to try and hold onto a surprisingly large fanbase, but by undoing a large deal of the past film this instalment feels like it actually wants to earn its following this time instead of promising a twisted take on Winnie the Pooh and then running with the money once we realised it was just hot tub girls getting killed off in a big house again.
This film isn’t above the sacred slasher tradition of objectifying nubile young women with minimal advancement to the plot; an extended setpiece in this film takes place in a fetish club where Pooh and friends unleash hell on some lingerie-clad dancers. But the key differences are firstly that the kill scenes here are actually relatively creative, with some nice slow-mo shots of Pooh entering the party followed by a nice sequence where Pooh goes about killing countless party goers but filmed through a tarpaulin sheet where only their disco-lit silhouettes and blood splatters convey the action. And another reason this detour works is exactly because of that; it’s a detour, not the main plot of the film with our supposed lead character being treated like the diversion.
The increased budget heralded by the prior film’s success (six-digits baby!) is warmly welcomed across the board here. The cinematography is massively upgraded, with a large portion of this film looking genuinely handsome with some nice golden hour photography to go around. However the biggest use of budget seems to be the impressive commitment to gore. Frake-Waterfield seems to be fully leaning into the particularly mean spirited nature of this character, sparing no expense when it comes to the violence on-screen. The sheer number of kills featured in this film is high even for a slasher film. Pooh has ridiculous super strength here, snapping limbs like chopsticks and pulling off heads like they’re bottle corks. And boy is there a lot of head-pulling here. Pooh even displays an affinity for Halloween 4 by stabbing, not shooting, a guy through the face with a shotgun (that’s always been a deal-breaker kill for me, but at least Pooh’s doing his horror homework).
But while the end result of the kills may be impressive, the build-up is still underwhelmingly inept. Suspense and buildup are woefully absent concepts with little to no grasp on establishing location or stakes. There’s a hurried rush to get to the kills, but then the kills themselves are still poorly filmed messes where the camerawork and editing fall apart into an indistinct, uncreative blur that finally holds on an impressive gore effect. It seems that despite the increase in resources the creatives behind this are still prone to old habits. The many static dialogue scenes, whilst lacking in the writing department, are all handsomely shot and framed to an extent that these are the moments that tricked me the most into believing I was watching an honest cinematic effort- and to be honest with the amount of experience these guys have shooting dialogue scenes you’d hope so, remember those runtimes aren’t gonna pad themselves out! However the habit to rush through setpieces and gloss over any action that is remotely exciting is still present as well, despite the fact that the budget to make these moments land is present. When you think about how these guys unironically have possibly the MOST filmmaking experience-per-year ratio of any living filmmaker, to my immediate knowledge only rivalling the output of peak Takashi Miike, it’s kind of depressing that there’s still no obvious signifier of craft or ingenuity when clearly a conscious effort has been made to rectify the issues people had with the previous film. Afterall, horror is arguably the finest genre to showcase raw cinematic talent despite a complete lack of resources: Night of the Living Dead, Halloween, Saw, I could go on forever.
In another example of unfortunate muscle memory, the Jagged Edge team seem to still be trying their best to keep their characters vague enough not to incur the wrath of copyright holders they’re ripping off; except the whole point of this film is that there is no copyright. While the specifics of Pooh and co’s visual character design is still copyrighted property locked up in the Disney vault, the approach to character is still utterly devoid of personality. Take Tigger for example, the goofy, spunky, fast talking tiger with the build of a pogo stick. Not only does he have the same abilities to effortlessly punch through ribcages just like Pooh and Owl, but now he’s fast… as are Pooh and Owl. As for charisma, the chattiest critter in Pooh’s posse and a longtime personal fave of mine now also has a big deep voice and just calls people bitch a lot (calling a club goer a “Fluorescent bitch” being probably this film’s most uninspired taunt.) This underlines a larger problem with this franchise so far; if the filmmakers have full creative licence with this long, rich collection of characters then why do they choose to be so coy with them? Instead of giving each creature the default low bad guy voice could they not have given Tigger his unique wacky lilt and sputtering lisp? Or what about his defining ability to, you know, bounce? Isn’t that what Tiggers do best?
This is all endemic of how the Blood and Honey team, who seem to be extremely keen to shock and cause outrage with their bad taste violence and leering fixation on scantily-clad women being dismembered, still don’t seem interested in desecrating and disrespecting the Winnie the Pooh tale itself. The story takes some hugely overwritten detours involving Christopher’s (entirely fabricated) long lost brother in order to give him some sort of new personal connection to Pooh, when the entire premise of the original story at its foundation is Christopher and Pooh’s relationship. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it with an eternity of exposition.
This habit of missing the Hundred Acre Wood for the trees seems to be the course for these copyright exploiters. This bizarre new phenomenon of intellectual properties that are still firmly beloved by the public now suddenly being at the mercy of them is a wonderful thing that I genuinely see huge potential in. Fan films and creatives who are personally attached to these stories are now allowed to expand or destroy them at their will, but so far we’re yet to see anyone fully take advantage of this opportunity. On the 1st of January this year when the copyright on Steamboat Willie expired and within mere hours two whole horror movie adaptations as well as a horror game based on the Mickey Mouse character were all announced by separate companies, was anyone really still laughing at the idea? Instead of a new frontier for remix culture we’ve instead been swarmed by grifters simply trying to capitalise on the fad. While Blood and Honey II does seem to be making a handful of interesting steps in the right direction, the announcement of an interconnected Poohniverse of Twisted Childhood adaptations kind of kills any hope I have of this franchise ever finding the punchline to its inaugural joke. And while there’s a larger pool of slasher fans who might find at least a slither of enjoyment in the gore, the Winnie the Pooh community will be sleeping soundly knowing that no number of head-splatters or boob shots are yet to even slightly tarnish his reputation.
Opening in Selected Cinemas Nationwide from Tomorrow, click the poster below to Find where Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey II is playing near you
