Into the Poohniverse: Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey 2

The Twisted Childhood Universe, or Poohniverse, is a collection of movies where wonderful, colourful, and, most importantly, public domain children’s characters kill people. 

The brainchild of British filmmaker Rhys Frake-Waterford, the cinematic universe is populated (and will be populated by) characters like Winnie the Pooh, Peter Pan, Pinocchio, Bambi, and Mary Poppins, among others. All given a dark makeover and murderous intent.

Into the Poohniverse is Film Inquiry’s look at these movies as the cinematic universe expands and the death toll rises. 

Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey 2

Back at it again. The first Blood and Honey has been called one of the worst movies ever made and won 6 Golden Raspberries (an award that meant more when they didn’t just go for the lowest hanging fruit), but it also made 7.7 million dollars from a budget of $100,000 so you can bet your ass they got to make another one. 

Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey 2 picks up a year after the 100 Acre Wood Massacre depicted in the first movie. Like the original Blood and Honey, the sequel opens with a wonderfully unsettling animated sequence, this time narrated by Simon Callow. 

In the year between the movies, the abominations Pooh and Piglet have been hunted through the woods and forced to reunite with two of their friends, Owl and Tigger. Christopher Robin, on the other hand, has become a pariah as most of the citizens of Ashdown, the town next to the woods, believe him to be a murderer, though some are on his side and spend their time bear hunting in the woods.

Although sidelined for the gang of damsels in distress for the first movie, Christopher Robin is front and centre this time, with Scott Chambers replacing Nikolai Leon in the role. Here, Robin is suffering from survivor’s guilt, repressed memories about a kidnapped brother, and the whispers and innuendos of the people in his village. Wide-eyed and childlike, Chambers sells us on a Christopher Robin who would have befriended a bunch of monsters in the woods and seen them as friends and not abominations. He’s a much deeper character than in Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey, and is given an actual plotline to work with as he unravels the mystery of his missing sibling. 

My main criticisms of Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey were all related to its first draft feeling, but Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey 2 instantly feels like more assured filmmaking with better performances, better dialogue, and an added feature that instantly elevates the entire enterprise: the animals can talk. 

I didn’t know I needed that so much, but having the incredibly designed Owl be an evil plotting mastermind hunting in the woods and dropping out of nowhere to pluck innocent bird watchers off their feet was such a perfect addition, it made the movie infinitely better. So many slashers have their silent tank villains like Jason, Michael Myers, and Leatherface, but there’s a big difference between a hulking masked villain and a giant, sadistic bear. Letting Pooh and his friends be able to speak lets the movie lean more into the camp elements that come pre-packaged with a movie in which Winnie-the-Pooh is the main villain.

The other clever element the movie adds is to make Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey a movie within the world of Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey 2. The idea is that after the massacre, a movie called Honey and Blood was released, depicting the massacre and when we see a clip of it, the Honey and Blood movie is actually Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey. This accounts for the recasting of all of the major parts, the lack of recognition of Robin’s dead wife/fiancee (presumably she was invented for the movie within the movie), and the general shittiness of Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey. It’s a fun masterstroke that lets the filmmakers have their cake and eat it too.

In that same vein, a major criticism of the first Blood and Honey was the lack of humour. It’s fine to have a straight-faced slasher movie, but when your antagonist is Winnie-the-Pooh and Piglet, you need to let the audience know you’re in on the joke too. Luckily, Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey 2 rectifies this with the addition of Tigger, a character with one-liners, creative kills, and a propensity for calling everyone a bitch. Across the board, making the villains vocal improves things. 

Horror has a rich history of silent slashers: Jason Voorhees, Michael Myers, Art the Clown, etc., but sometimes you need a Freddy Kruger and Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey 2 realises this and employs its speaking monsters effectively, especially in a rave massacre scene that takes up most of the final act and contains lines like, “Come here you fluorescent bitch!” while Tigger stalks brightly clothed dancers through a factory.

This is not to say that the movie is purely a horror comedy in the vein of Shaun of the Dead or The Final Girls. It finds moments to have fun, but without falling into the too-serious tone of the first movie, it also tells a straight-faced horror story about kidnapped children and experiments. One of the best scenes in the film features Simon Callow delivering a monologue about Pooh’s origins while acting everyone else off the screen.

It is wonderful to see the development of the filmmakers behind these movies in just the space of two films. All the major criticisms of the first Blood and Honey are absent here in a movie that is better written, better acted, and all around better made than its predecessor. This is most certainly a popcorn movie, but it’s engaging, funny, and scary. The new villains are horrific and entertaining, and the movie is fun and cheeky, as in the scene where the monsters appear to play Pooh sticks with body parts.

After finishing Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey, I was worried about the path I was taking into the Poohniverse and what schlock awaited me, but after watching Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey 2, I’m excited to see what these filmmakers have in store and how weird they’re going to go with this whole thing.