YMMV / Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey

• Accidental Aesop: Don't feed wild animals no matter how friendly they seem, as they will struggle to find food once you stop and become aggressive to people as a result.
• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Did Pooh and Piglet capture Christopher Robin instead of just killing him because they wanted to torture him by killing innocent people around him? Or was it because the two couldn't actually bring themselves to kill someone they considered their friend even though they think he abandoned them to suffer? The end of the movie could be used to argue either point, since Pooh allowed Christopher Robin to escape, but not before killing the Final Girl in front of him.
  • Did Pooh and Piglet fall off the wagon without Christopher Robin caring for them? Or were they lazy, dependent jerks who used self-pity to avoid learning how to take care of themselves? The fact that they clearly found a way to sustain themselves in the five years before Christopher Robin returned supports the latter interpretation.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: Pooh summoning a swarm of bees to kill John. At no point prior to this was it suggested that he or Piglet had implicitly supernatural powers, and even afterwards he just goes back to using his bare hands and weapons to kill Jess and Maria.
• Bile Fascination: Many people were interested in seeing this film after the very vocal backlash the film's trailers received on social media, if only to see if the movie was as bad (or at the very least, childhood-destroying) as audiences claimed.
• Cliché Storm: While the film garnered widespread attention because of its concept, it really isn't that creative and interesting whatsoever. If anything, the film is nothing more than a generic paint-by-numbers slasher flick that just so happens to have Winnie-the-Pooh and Piglet as the main villains for the sake of exploiting the fact that the original 1926 Winnie-the-Pooh book is now in the public domain.
• Critical Dissonance: Sort of. Critics near-unanimously^note 3% Tomatometer score ("Rotten") and an average rating of 2.2/10 on Rotten Tomatoes based on 58 reviews blasted the film for being a low-effort, opportunistic schlock with an incoherent story that fails to make creative use of its source material. Audiences were somewhat more forgiving, with 50% of verified audiences (over 100 users) on Rotten Tomatoes giving it a positive rating and 40% of all audiences there approving. Metacritic shows a wider dissonance with a Metascore of 16 out of 100 ("overwhelming dislike") from 19 critics and a 7.2 out of 10 user score from 91 ratings. It is averted, however, if the IMDb user rating is used, with a 3.1/10 weighted user average based on over 15,000 ratings.
• Critic-Proof: The exploitation of a beloved children's book character entering the public domain for a film with a budget of just $100,000, and the Bile Fascination said film attracted, meant that it was easily going to make a profit regardless of what the critics thought of it.
• Dancing Bear:
  • No pun intended. The idea of Winnie the Pooh and Piglet becoming slasher villains is what got the attention of the public. The director has even talked about how absurd a concept this is and knows the story can't be taken seriously.^note Ironically, one of the biggest complaints about the movie is its lack of camp and humor, in that it takes itself too seriously.
    Waterfield: When you try and do a film like this, and it’s a really wacky concept, it's very easy to go down a route where nothing is scary and it’s just really ridiculous and really, like, stupid. And we wanted to go between the two.
  • It was also notable simply for being one of the first works to utilize Pooh following his entry into the public domain at the start of 2022, signifying new possibilities for him and other characters after decades of copyright extension.
• Just Here for Godzilla: A slasher film where a group of friends is killed off one by one by two killers? A curious, but hardly unique concept. A group of people butchered by Winnie the Pooh and Piglet? Now that's going to get people's attention.
• Memetic Mutation: Comparisons to Hotline Miami became prevalent after the first promotional images were released.
• Nightmare Retardant: The designs of Pooh and Piglet for this movie both look pretty silly and more like spoof parodies of a typical slasher-type villain, not helped by the very poor special effects.^note This is more likely due to, while Pooh and Piglet are in the public domain, their Disney designs (arguably their most famous portrayal) are not, so they had to skirt around the issue.
• Older Than They Think: The idea of an "evil Winnie-the-Pooh" (or at least a Darker and Edgier Winnie-the-Pooh) has actually been done before, albeit mostly for comedic purposes:
  • The Red Dwarf episode "Meltdown" made a joke about Winnie the Pooh getting involved in a civil war and being executed by a firing squad off-screen (although in this case he was on the good side and was one of their last forces standing after their actual warriors were lost).
  • And even before that, there was Todd Graham's 1987 short Apocalypse Pooh, which inserts Pooh into an Apocalypse Now parody.
  • 4 years before this film, the YouTube channel Jaboody Dubs did their own take on a Winnie the Pooh horror movie.
  • There was also the CollegeHumor video "Cartoon Bears Are Still Bears", in which Pooh is shown (along with The Berenstain Bears, Yogi and Boo Boo, Smokey Bear, the Charmin Bears and the Care Bears) to turn into a vicious, man-eating beast upon getting a whiff of some delicious human meat.
  • Of course, the idea of a character associated with Disney being involved in a violent setting can bring to mind the "Vietnam Mickey" saga made by Ethereal Snake.
  • Robot Chicken also once did a skit where Pooh mauls Christopher Robin after running out of honey.
  • Chapter 3 of Dirty Potter's Dirty the Pooh series has Pooh becoming a Hollywood Satanist and gruesomely murdering all the other animals in the 100 Acre Wood.
  • This one is more of a stretch than the rest, but Mickey's House of Villains, after the villains take over, both Piglet and Bambi are seen walking into the house alongside the villains, which, while not outright showing them to be evil, implies a darker side that we don't usually see.
  • Magical Adventures of Winnie the Pooh is Polish Crack Fic about Pooh and his friend being comedic sociopaths focused on drinking, taking drugs and laughing from Camp Gay Christopher Robin.
• So Bad, It's Good: From the ridiculous designs of Winnie and Piglet, to the poor special effects, to the hilariously wooden acting, it's not hard to enjoy this movie ironically. Some have said it may as well be an unintentional spoof of the Slasher Film genre.
• Special Effect Failure: Pooh and Piglet just look awful. The film attempts to Hand Wave this by claiming them as "cross-breeds" and "abominations" instead of anything whimsical, but the two are literally just grown men in vaguely appropriate clothing wearing rubber masks that barely move or emote at all. Their hands aren't even painted to be the same color as their faces, which can be seen on the movie poster!
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Many Winnie-the-Pooh fans hate the film for changing the light-hearted tone of the original source material into a twisted horror setting. In fact, it has been reported that many fans even went as far as to send death threats to the film's cast and production crew members. Jim Cummings^note the official voice of Disney's Winnie the Pooh and Tigger himself found the very idea of the film disgusting and wants no association with it whatsoever, even threatening to sue the studio if they so much as imitate his voice.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: General consensus is that besides the animated storybook opening, the film does absolutely nothing with the Winnie the Pooh source material in favor of a generic slasher film where the killers just happen to be named Winnie the Pooh and Piglet.^note Though, to be fair, this was mainly out of legal necessity, as the film's director had admitted he deliberately shifted away from the source material in order to avoid getting into legal hot water with Disney, who still has full ownership of their incarnations of the characters. Granted that begs the question of why spend the effort to include the characters in the first place if you knew you weren't going to be able to do anything with them?
• Took the Bad Film Seriously:
  • Towards production as a whole; one of the biggest complaints to come regarding the film is that in spite of its wacky premise, it takes itself too seriously. The project has none of the Camp value you'd expect about a horror movie where the killers are Winnie the Pooh and Piglet.
  • The director in particular has taken the franchise very seriously after the release, already talking about a sequel when more of the Pooh characters become public domain, as well as two spin-off films about Peter Pan in a nightmare version of Neverland, and a version of Bambi where the deer gets bloody revenge on the hunter responsible for killing his mother. Not only that, but the director also wants all the movies to be connected in something of a "Dark Public Domain" Universe to allow for crossovers. He's even talked about purchasing the rights to make a horror version of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to add to his franchise universe as well, even though those characters won't be public domain for decades still.
  • Nikolai Leon does his best as Christopher Robin, giving the role the respect it warrants. In the final speech where he begs to rejoin Pooh, he gives it his all.
  • Composer Andrew Scott Bell does a phenomenal job with the score. The behind-the-scenes goes into detail about a major instrument: a violin that had been used as beehive, by actual bees, producing a sound that is both eerie and fitting. The score also utilizes Ominous Latin Chanting of the words "Blood and Honey", with all of the parts of the choir sung by Bell himself. It's hard not to smile during the featurette when Bell talks about how much he loves his job.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Many people felt that Pooh and Piglet's Start of Darkness (being forced to kill and eat Eeyore due to a winter famine) just made them look like lazy and incompetent freeloaders that can't take care of themselves and rely on sponging off of Christopher Robin.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: A few months after the film's release, a teacher in Miami decided to show it to his class of 9-to-10-year-olds, and didn't even realize switching it off would probably be a good idea for twenty minutes, despite the kids' horrified reactions. The director was left hoping the kids wouldn't be permanently traumatized.
• The Woobie: Christopher Robin. He was an innocent child when he befriended Pooh and Piglet and had no idea that leaving them to go to college would deprive them of food and lead to them turning evil.

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