Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey gets three things right past its clickbait premise

polygon.com:

Make no mistake, the virally infamous provocation Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey is a dreary, dispiriting movie. It’s meant as a sort of cheeky, transgressively gruesome sequel to A.A. Milne’s classic 1920s children’s booksWinnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner — stories inspired by Milne’s own young son, Christopher Robin Milne, and his beloved stuffed animals. Since the 1960s, those stories have been kept in the public eye by Walt Disney Animation’s animated adaptations and extensions, which mine gentle adventures out of the interactions between a chubby, hapless teddy bear and his friends.

Blood and Honey was made possible in 2022, when Milne’s copyright on Pooh expired, and writer-director Rhys Frake-Waterfield saw an opportunity for a clickbait-worthy horror twist on the character. (Disney’s copyright over its own version of Milne’s characters remains in effect.) In the horror-movie version, Pooh and his timid friend Piglet are all grown up and have become serial killers. That’s pretty much the entire movie right there: a couple of goons in grotesque Pooh and Piglet masks, silently hacking their way through a bunch of all-but-anonymous victims. There’s barely any framing or narrative; it’s just a series of repetitive murders, mostly spaced out with scenes of Pooh lurking in the woods or stalking victims.

Blood and Honey does have a few things going for it, for viewers in love with practical-effects gore and classic exploitation cinema. It isn’t an innovative movie or a particularly surprising one, but it does a few things well:

But all of that is still pretty thin grist for a movie that never gives its killers any reason to exist, or its audience any reason to root for the victims. Early in the movie, a