I went into Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey thinking it was going to be garbage. But this isn’t the regular weekly garbage collected every Thursday. No, this is the type of garbage you find in a hoarder’s house and it’s funk has seeped into the carpet and floorboard and you’re almost certain there was a rodent or even a cat that was somewhere in there but it’s so badly decomposed that even the most experienced forensic pathologists will gag a little upon the site of it.
It’s a vile, disgusting, misogynistic piece of rubbish that manages to be so sexist and misogynistic they couldn’t stop the titular character from ripping off a woman’s clothing to expose her breasts. I never heard of Rhys Frake-Waterfield before seeing this movie but a quick Google search appears like someone messed together Aaron Seltzer and Jason Friedberg desire for bad taste and filth with Ari Aster’s pompous self-cocky attitude. I’m almost sure he’s told women “He’s a nice guy” several times.
Now, I don’t horror movies that are violent or gory as long as it’s done well. But the violence in this movie isn’t even exploitive like in the Final Destination, Saw or Hostel movies. It’s just grim and unneccessary especially when you consider there’s not much of a plot and all scenes are drawn out because the filmmakers needed to make a movie that was at least 80 minutes. This may have worked as a crazy horror short of an anthology. But here, it’s just meandering.
I once sat during a murder trial where for about an hour, maybe two, a forensic expert for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives went over countless photographs of an arson scene. This is what that movie felt like. To make it seems crazier, in high school for Honors Latin, I had to translate A.A. Milne’s book from Latin into English or English into Latin, I’ve forgotten. But I had more fun (which by the way I’m being sarcastic) than watching this.
The set-up looks promising. In animation, we hear through a narrator that when he was a child, Christopher Robin played with the animals of 100 Acres Woods but as he became a teenager, he left and went on to school. Thinking that the animals would resort to their natural instincts, he felt it was time to move on. The only problem is with no one to bring them any food, they began to starve and during a harsh winter, they were forced to kill and eat Eeyore.
I guess they must have eated Owl, Rabbitt, Roo and Tigger too because they don’t appear. No, basically because Disney would have sued the absolute fuck out of the filmmakers if they included this. (Mark this the one time, Disney was the hero. Yes, the company that fucking sued a daycare center for having Mickey and Goofy on the wall is the hero in this situation.) No, you see part of the property went into public domain so that’s why this movie was made.
And to paraphase Ian Malcolm from Jurassic Park, the filmmakers were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they never stopped to think if they should. Reportedly when word spread the movie was to be paid, people pleaded with the filmmakers to stop even issuing death threats. But still, it could’ve been a good idea. It could’ve worked. Yet it doesn’t.
It could’ve been a nice revenge story of a deranged Pooh (played by a lumbering Craig David Dowsett) terorizing Christopher (Nikolai Leon) who has brought his girlfriend or wife, Mary (Paula Coiz) to see where he grew up. But that’s over and done with the minute Piglet (Chris Cordell) strangles Mary for just 15 seconds while Christopher does nothing but tell him to stop. There’s a lot of people just standing around watching Pooh and Piglet do their murderous deeds. No one’s ever running the opposite direction. And even though there have been many bodies found in the woods, no one knows better to stay away.
Instead of Christopher, who appears so little, he’s not even the main character, we get some other story about some traumatized woman Maria (Maria Taylor) going to the house in the woods with her friends played by Natasha Rose Mills, Amber Doig-Thorne, Danielle Ronald, Natasha Tosini and May Kelly. It doesn’t matter saying who they play. It’s not necessary and you can’t tell them apart. They eventually get killed by Pooh or Piglet in gruesome ways way more gruesome than the men in the movie. Apparently, the two have learned to operate heavy machinery and even drive a car.
Oh, for somehow, Pooh has an abundance of honey he slurps all over his face. So, either he’s become a beekeeper or he’s managed to find a stockpile of honey somewhere. What sucks is the masks look so outlandish and fake. They’re the worst I’ve seen since Troll 2. But I won’t think this movie will have that movie’s fanbase. Troll 2 worked because the filmmakers thought they were making a good movie. Frake-Waterfield knows he’s making an awful movie and he revels in how awful it is. To call him a filmmaker would be an insult.
The annoying moppets in Super 8 who wanted to make a zombie movie with cheap special effects were far more respectable than the people who made this. A lot of good movies have been made on cheap budgets. This one cost about $100,000 and it made about $5 millon worldwide most of it probably just out of curiosity. Needless to say, Frake-Waterfield has planned a sequel and even a shared universe focusing on Bambi and Peter Pan, among others.
If they’re anything like this movie, they’re all going to suck, because to paraphrase another line from Jurassic Park, it’s one big pile of shit!
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 