Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey 2 review – witless nonsense

So much great art is the result of a 75-year-in-the-making IP raid in which the budding artist dips and dives through various copyright loopholes and creates their masterpiece on the shoulders of some forgotten classic open for plunder.

No, look, sorry Rhys Frake-Waterfield, no, no, no, no, no. Just because you got a bit more budget this time around, just because they sent you an extra vat of latex gloop, just because you were allowed a extra few hours on Quantel Paintbox to spit-shine the crummy digital VFX, doesn’t make Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey II anything more than the heinous, cack-handed brand cash-in that it is.

For those who didn’t get the memo the first time around, here’s the pitch: imagine Winnie-the-Pooh was basically Leatherface and he loped around the 100 Acre Wood in hillbilly dungarees and just butchered anyone in his path. And that’s it. That’s the gag. And that is all that happens in this dismal sequel, in which Pooh and pals engage in a string of heroically unimaginative kills, dispatching garish one-dimensional fleshpods whose only role is to be on the business end of whatever blunt instrument is hurtling towards their cranium.

Director Frake-Waterfield attempts to pass off his cheapjack mode as self-conscious kitsch, with a few lines of dialogue which may as well have been spoken while the actor winks towards the lens. But witless nonsense is still witless nonsense when it’s in quote marks, and following a strangely detailed set-up, the film lurches into a second half in which the kill count rises exponentially, alongside the feeling of skull-compounding boredom.

If the film is basically a gore panto, then its Widow Twanky is played by none other than raconteur and scholar Simon Callow, who delivers the film’s sole redeeming feature by doing a very OTT Scottish accent. Yet faith is lost almost immediately as he wangs on through what feels like a ten minute monologue that not even a maestro like Callow can sustain, and it becomes very clear that we’re watching a bit of expositional padding so there’s enough scratch in the coffers for the final chainsaw-based blow-out.

Maybe it seems unfair to be so down on a film that’s bringing a little more precision and finesse to the screen than the execrable, amateur hour original from 2023. Yet the issue here is nothing to do with the execution, and everything to do with the ethics of making such a film. What’s so galling is that Frake-Waterfield and his writer Matt Leslie do absolutely nothing with the IP beyond steal the characters and the setting. They’re happy to have the name recognition and a nice little hook to get some tabloid column inches, but scrape away all the context and you’re left with the most generic slasher movie imaginable. There’s so little recourse to hunny in this film that you wonder if they even bothered to read Milne’s wonderful books?

This is already being described as the second part of a proposed TCU (Twisted Child Universe), with a Peter Pan rip-off film en route. Yet this whole concept is a form of grave-pissing, so wantonly lowbrow that it can’t even operate as parody. So yes, in case it hasn’t come across bluntly enough thus far, this is a ghastly bit of business.

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