Film critics have always had something of a strange job. To me, context is everything with a film – it can make or break your appreciation of it. Watching a period drama on a Sunday afternoon as the only person in the audience under 60? Life-changing. Seeing Top Gun: Maverick in IMAX? I had to be physically restrained from enlisting in the Air Force.
So, after watching Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey on an early weekday morning with a coterie of critics, I became bitterly jealous of everyone who gets to witness whatever that movie was with three glasses of wine inside them and part of a sold-out Friday night crowd. They will, I am sure, have an experience bordering on the religious.
Does this ultimately mean Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey is any good? Of course not. But expecting a film like this to be good in the conventional sense is a fool’s errand. Clearly, nobody in the production expected it to be good so why should you? It is a technically incompetent slasher movie that delivers on the simple promise of seeing Winnie-the-Pooh and Piglet-shaped figures hack some people to death for 80 minutes.
The thrill undoubtedly wore off the second Blood and Honey’s goofy marketing went viral. But it is – in my eyes – a better bear-themed horror movie than, say, Cocaine Bear. That film was fatally self-conscious of its inherent silliness whereas Blood and Honey just cracks on with it because it has no conscience to speak of. Besides, it cost 0.333333333% of Cocaine Bear’s budget so forgive me for supporting independent British cinema.
The marketing majorly buried the lede by not disclosing that the film’s protagonists are a group of virtually identical dark-haired huns. I can’t remember their names but I think the main girl was called Maria (Maria Taylor) and she, in an effort to escape her perfunctorily-explained past trauma, sets off for a country getaway with her girlfriends. Naturally, their Airbnb happens to neighbour the Hundred Acre Wood where a bloodthirsty and abandoned Winnie-the-Pooh and Piglet (but not Eeyore, he died) lie in wait.
On the most basic level Blood and Honey works as a slasher movie. That’s about it. The rest of your enjoyment derives from watching something so hastily and clumsily assembled that it almost resembles a home movie. Blood and Honey excels when you pretend everyone involved decided to make it for their own personal enjoyment. There are great pleasures to be found in this film, none of which seem to be intentional.
Blood and Honey is not a good film but it is the type of film where scenes specified to take place at 3am are filmed in obvious daylight. It is a film where supposedly heavy metal chains fall away at the slightest touch. It is a film where characters scream, “Why are you doing this? What’s happening?” five minutes before the end. At one point Winnie-the-Pooh karate-chops a man’s hand off. You could not pay me to wholeheartedly condemn a film that includes a scene of Winnie-the-Pooh karate-chopping a man’s hand off. So, I won’t. Sue me.
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ANTICIPATION.
Uhh.… wut? 1
ENJOYMENT.
Godawful. But someone does call Winnie-the-Pooh a nonce, so partial credit. 2
IN RETROSPECT.
If you go down to the woods today you’d better be blind drunk. 1
Directed by
Rhys Frake-Waterfield
Starring
Nikolai Leon, Maria Taylor, Craig David Dowsett
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