WINNIE THE POOH: BLOOD AND HONEY ** UK 2023 Dir: Rhys Frake-Waterfield. 84 mins
With Winnie the Pooh entering the public domain, it was only a matter of time before someone turned our pleasant childhood memories of the Hundred Acre Wood into horrific nightmares.
With a mixture of animation and live action, the opening scenes really engage the audience as we hear all about our favourite characters from the Hundred Acre Wood. Sadly, this is probably the most interesting part of the film as we just go downhill from here.
This is mostly down to a weak plot, as Christopher Robin is barely in this film even though the plot revolves around him leaving the strange hybrids to head off to university. Instead we meet a group of girls who have no apparent personality, nor a link to Robin. The writers seemed to focus on the main girl having trauma and not adding anything else to their characters.
Basically, this is just a typical budget slasher using a creepy mask of Winnie the Pooh and a warthog hybrid claiming to be Piglet.
Director / Writer Rhys Frake-Waterfield clearly had some good ideas, yet couldn’t stick with them long enough to fulfill a good storyline. The film is a mismatch of random ideas half-heartedly put together.
I probably could have overlooked this if we had interesting characters that were portrayed by talented actors. To be fair to the cast, the dialogue certainly didn’t help showcase their abilities.
There were moments of unintentional humour that made the seemingly unfinished product barely watchable, so I’d swerve this one.
What a waste!
Review by Poppy Blundell
WINNIE THE POOH: BLOOD & HONEY is out now on Digital and on Blu-ray and DVD.