In the first Bad Ideas Flashback I revisit the horrors of Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey

I still have PTSD from suffering through this travesty. Tragically, it was a big hit and led to a wave of opportunistic bloodbaths about beloved characters now unfortunately in the public domain.

There are bad movies and then there are movies that make you despair for humanity’s future. The execrable new exploitation movie Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey is the second kind of stinker. Its existence reflects terribly not just on the monsters who made it but on our species as a whole. It’s less a traditional motion picture than a strong argument that humanity is beyond redemption and should be swept away in a great, cleansing flood, Noah-style, or obliterated completely. Someday, a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the big screen.

Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey is the regrettable product of a loophole in copyright law that allowed these vultures to twist, distort and corrupt A.A. Milne’s beloved icons of gentleness and childhood innocence to their own mercenary ends.

Alas, as Jurassic Park warned us, just because something can be done does not mean that it should be done. Just because you can inexplicably make a movie where silly, lovable old Winnie the Pooh is now a kill-crazy super-sadist who treats the cerebellums of beautiful young women the way Gallagher treated watermelons—as something that should be joyously smashed with a giant hammer as often as possible, for the sheer joy of doing so—doesn’t mean that you should.

Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey is 84 excruciating minutes of things that should not be done, a grim wallow through the depths of human depravity and not, I would argue, a good or wholesome representation of this beloved character.

This cheap exercise in GG Allin-style shock is an insult as well as an assault, on poor Pooh and Milne but also on the suckers in the audience, who paid good money to have their childhoods brutally and repeatedly violated.

If a very small number of good-hearted sadists who have paid subscriptions to Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas had not voted for me to do so, I would have walked out of Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey within the first half hour or so, when it became achingly apparent that this wasn’t as bad and ugly as it looked: it was much worse.

The opportunistic atrocity begins with an animated sequence explaining that Christopher Robin was good friends with Winnie the Pooh and the rest of the 100 Acre gang when he was a boy and the world was new and full of joy and wonder.

Then he went away to college to become a doctor and left his anthropomorphic animal friends to fend for themselves. Things then took a turn. Without Christopher to provide for them and their needs they went mad with hunger and desperation.

To survive they killed Eeyore, greedily devoured his flesh and then, out of shame and anger, vowed to suppress their human sides by never talking ever again and waging an all-out war on humanity in blood-splattered retribution for Christopher growing up and moving away.

Eeyore was lucky. Being devoured by your closest friends is a dignified and happy fate compared to what happens to the movie’s malevolent mutant Winnie the Pooh and Piglet.

I was abandoned by my mother so I know how it can hurt to be left behind by the people who are supposed to care about you. But Winnie the Pooh and Piglet overreact by killing everyone they encounter in as vicious a manner as possible.

Anyone who has spent this much time lovingly thinking up new and agonizing ways for the bodies of young women to be tortured, mutilated and destroyed belongs on a list, and not of promising young horror filmmakers.

We open with a now grown up Christopher Robin foolishly returning to the place of his happiest childhood memories to reunite with his beloved boyhood pals. He’s disturbed to discover that everything has changed in the ensuing years and not for the better.

Evidence of Winnie the Pooh and Piglet’s unspeakable depravity and bottomless lust for blood, bones, viscera and carnage is everywhere in the form of ghoulish trophies literally dripping in blood and also sometimes honey.

These monsters of pure, deranged id are ostensibly the Winnie the Pooh and Piglet of our own childhood memories and imagination but they could not be more disgustingly off-brand. If a new variation of a character doesn’t look, act or sound anything like the original version is it really that character at all or just a wildly unconvincing imitation?

Winnie the Pooh at least looks like someone took a mask of the Disney version of the character, blacked out the eyes and gave it a creepy expression to make it scary, the way you sometimes see in Youtube videos.

Piglet, on the other hand, doesn’t look or sound like Milne’s creation in the least. That’s largely because the Disney versions of these characters are still under copyright, so they can’t look too much like them or risk getting sued. So Piglet looks NOTHING like the actual Piglet. He’s just a disgusting, horned feral pig monster. If you were to show a picture of “Piglet” to a hundred people on the street not a single soul would be able to pick him out as a slasher movie variation of Piglet rather than just a mean-looking pig monster.

Winnie the Pooh and Piglet brutally murder Christopher Robin’s girlfriend and then take him to a torture shack where they spend the rest of the film abusing his body and mind in increasingly violent ways, using him as a guinea pig to see just how much abuse the human body can endure.

We then shift our focus from poor Christopher Robin and his unfortunate girlfriend to a gaggle of attractive female British college students who head to the Hundred Acre Wood for some rest and relaxation and find themselves being hunted and picked off one by one by a grotesque, blood-crazed bear and pig pair who live only to make people suffer.

Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey shows its hand early. Like its villains, its only interest lies in destroying the bodies of tiny English women in ways that are as inventive as they are brutal.

This sick twist of a motion picture subjects audiences to an exhausting and dispirited gauntlet of ultra-violence. There’s nothing fun, funny, or cathartic about the bloodshed. There’s no relief or variation, just ugliness.

The audience at the 8:45 screening of Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey that I went to watched the movie in stunned silence. They didn’t laugh. They didn’t have fun. They just sat there, mortified, feeling guilty for supporting this deplorable enterprise with their cold hard cash and morbid curiosity.

If Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey does well it will open a Pandora’s Box of similarly exploitation movies that re-create beloved staples of our individual and collective childhoods as fiends whose life revolves around torturing telegenic young women.

That would be a REAL shame. Let’s not give this the oxygen and attention and support it wants. Let’s not create a world where there’s an incentive to make a Paddington movie where he’s a necrophiliac rapist, cannibal, and serial killer or one where Wallace and Gromit set homeless people on fire, then put out the fires with their urine.

We’re better than this! I mean, we’re not great, obviously. In many ways we fucking suck but let’s not do this to ourselves or our children.

The concept of a Winnie the Pooh movie that’s more violent than Last House on the Left and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre put together might seem like a sick joke but Blood and Honey is devoid of even a single moment of humor or levity.

It’s interested only in punishing the audience for being the kind of degenerates who make this lucrative as well as possible.

To put things in Roger Ebert terms, I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie.

It’s the recipient of the first grade in Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas history, a much-deserved Zero Stars for being not just a bad movie but a movie that should not exist and cannot be forgotten quickly enough.

Zero Stars

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Sign up for an annual paid subscription to this newsletter, and get a free copy of The Fractured Mirror and the “Weird Al” Yankovic-themed coloring book The Weird A-Coloring To Al for free

Purchase The Fractured Mirror, my just-released magnum opus about American movies about filmmaking, which has a foreword from Gremlins 2: The New Batch director Joe Dante and illustrations from Felipe Sobreiro (Return of the Blues Brothers, The Authorized Al), from me here or from Amazon here

Sign up for an annual paid subscription to this newsletter, and get a free copy of The Fractured Mirror and the “Weird Al” Yankovic-themed coloring book The Weird A-Coloring To Al for free