Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey film evaluate (2023)

The very best joke is that you just see Pooh’s spherical ears and button-nose in ominous photographs the place Leatherface or Michael Myers are presupposed to be, with crimson overalls and a rubbery masks that is frozen to a kind of honey-suckling grin. Judging from the mildly amused reactions of different folks within the theater, these reveals are the movie’s most constant chuckles, and I agree. You by no means get bored with seeing Frake-Waterfield’s model of Pooh and Piglet (portrayed by Craig David Dowsett and Chris Cordell, respectively) pitched as towering psychopaths, however the film additionally makes you want it tried more durable.
“Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey” struggles to be notable outdoors of its irreverent IP comedian reduction, regardless of simplifying itself. Take away the Pooh and Piglet stuff, and you’ve got a ho-hum stalker thriller that treats its one-dimensional characters as punchlines for gory scenes its finances cannot totally ship on. On this case, 5 ladies (Maria Taylor, Natasha Tosini, Natasha Rose Mills, Amber Doig-Thorne, and Danielle Ronald) have gathered at a distant cabin close to Pooh and Piglet’s kingdom of sadism. Frake-Waterfield would not even humor us with a lot growth or take care of these ladies; we all know that one in all them, Maria Taylor’s Maria, is traumatized by a person who stalks her again within the metropolis, and that is her getaway. “Blood and Honey” then lumps her in with different simple targets for simpler shocks: the ladies are as gullible as anybody deeply offended by this film, and we’re meant to snicker at every poor selection these characters make.
A sentence I by no means thought I would write: Pooh and Piglet proceed to terrorize these ladies, with just a few different victims thrown in, typically in a method akin to ritual sacrifice. It solely turns into uneasy when it turns into so apparent. It is a number of ladies—many with black hair, curiously—experiencing head trauma. Oh, hassle.
Whether or not one finds this film’s promise giddy or gross, the phobia scenes are a lot too drawn out, full of extraneous beats that create useless air. There are numerous improvised-looking of scenes of stalking or screaming for assist, during which everyone seems to be caught ready for a higher storytelling imaginative and prescient to spherical out the joke. One scene that lacks self-awareness has Piglet strolling in a shallow indoor pool, wielding a sledgehammer at his prey. A humorous set-up, however the scene itself can barely transfer. The entire mission has that baffling defect—how do you narrow a premise like this right down to the bone, with Pooh and Piglet roughly rampaging for 85 minutes, and make the film so boring?