Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey 2 (2024)

1 Star (out of 4)

Grave Robin

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

This horror sequel has a budget of more than ten times that of the original, and is certainly of higher quality, but in many ways it's so much worse, so much more callous, thoughtless, and conniving. Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey could be written off as an accident, a movie that would have gone direct-to-video and been forgotten if not for a bit of controversy, but Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey 2 is very much on purpose.

Christopher Robin (Scott Chambers) received the blame for what became known as the "100 Acre Wood Massacre," and has become an outcast, fired from his job as a doctor and ostracized by his friends. Lexy (Tallulah Evans) is the only one who stands by him, as well as his parents (Alec Newman and Nicola Wright) and young sister Bunny (Thea Evans).

Hunters in the woods stumble upon Piglet and kill him, prompting Pooh, now joined by Owl, to get closer to the sleepy town of Ashdown, to destroy Christopher and everything he cares about. It just so happens that, on the fateful night, Christopher's friends are throwing a huge rave. It also happens that Pooh and Owl have one more friend ready to join them.

Here's a movie that flaunts its disregard for favorite childhood characters, but does nothing with it. It has no message, about nostalgia, about copyright, or about anything. It's an amateur's effort to recreate the goriest stuff from favorite horror movies, using a gimmick that the filmmakers were lucky (crazy?) enough to stumble upon, making the movie sellable. (They promise many more movies in what is now becoming a franchise.)

The filmmaking is rough and rudimentary, with no sense of space, no real scares or humor, or anything we can care about. The monsters smash up their human prey so easily — weapons slicing through bone and flesh like papier-mâché — that it means nothing. Their dialogue ("like pigs to the slaughter!") is excruciating. (The only improvement is that the costumes look better; we can now see the creatures' eyes.) Absolutely everything is familiar and predictable.

Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey 2 might be totally worthless, indeed worth ignoring, if not for the danger that children might accidentally watch it without knowing what really lurks behind it… the absolute opposite of the stories of friendship and imagination that A.A. Milne wrote about nearly a century ago.