Film Review: "Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey" (2023).

"A horror retelling of the famous legend of Winnie-The-Pooh." This is Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey. This British independent slasher film written and directed by Rhys Frake-Waterfield, in his directorial debut. The film serves as a horror retelling of A. A. Milne and E. H. Shepard's books of the titular character of the same name. The days of adventures and merriment have come to an end, as Christopher Robin, now a young man, has left Winnie-The-Pooh and Piglet to fend for themselves. As time passes, feeling angry and abandoned, the two become feral. After getting a taste for blood, Winnie-The-Pooh and Piglet set off to find a new source of food. It’s not long before their bloody rampage begins.

In late May 2022, it was announced that a Winnie-the-Pooh-based horror film adaptation. The characters' rights had been owned by The Walt Disney Company since 1966 and, while Disney retains exclusive rights to the depictions of these characters from their own franchise, the first Winnie-the-Pooh book went into the public domain in January 1, 2022. After the copyright lapsed, Frake-Waterfield began production on Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey the same year, with the film marking his directorial debut. The masks used for Pooh and Piglet in the film were created by the American prosthetic-mask manufacturing company Immortal Masks, which actually did the Winnie-the-Pooh-styled masks before the 1926 book entered the public domain. Frake-Waterfield was careful to avoid Pooh's iconic red shirt, as well as any other elements from Disney's depictions that could pose a copyright issue. By April 2022, Nikolai Leon, Craig David Dowsett, Chris Cordell, Maria Taylor, Natasha Rose Mills, Amber Doig-Thorne, Danielle Ronald, Natasha Tosini, Paula Coiz, May Kelly, Richard D. Myers, Simon Ellis, Jase Rivers, Marcus Massey, Danielle Scott, Mark Haldor, and Toby Wynn-Davies were cast. At the same time, principal photography commenced and took place in the Ashdown Forest of East Sussex, England, over a period of ten days. After the increased popularity of the film, ITN Studios gave the film an increased budget, leading to several days of reshoots. This would lead to the film being the most expensive film Waterfield ever directed and the most expensive film produced by ITN, with a budget of under $100,000. In July, Andrew Scott Bell was announced as the composer for the film. Bell drove from Los Angeles to San Francisco, with his manager Mike Rosen, to collect a honeycomb-filled violin from an experimental luthier to compose the film's soundtrack. The film was originally planned to be released in October 2022, but the increased publicity and reshoots motivated the change to a February 15, 2023 theatrical release date.

The film stars Leon, Dowsett, Cordell, Taylor, Mills, Doig-Thorne, Ronald, Tosini, Coiz, Kelly, Myers, Ellis, Rivers, Massey, Scott, Haldor, and Wynn-Davies. Aside from Winnie and Piglet themselves, there was too many other characters, especially the girls, not to like in this film.

Just a one-note premise that might have made for an entertaining, viral short film, extended into a forgettable horror movie whose main accomplishment is cashing in on a dubious trend.

Simon says Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey receives: