Winnie the Pooh Blood and Honey becomes one of the worst-reviewed movies of all time

The reviews of Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey, the much-touted slasher horror remake of AA Milne's beloved children's stories, are here. And boy, it doesn't look good. The film has a score of 6 per cent on the review aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes. The critical consensus is just "Oh, bother", Pooh's famous catchphrase, and that should give an idea as to how bad the movie is — as per the critics at least. But even the audiences have given it a 58 per cent rating. Blood and Honey became possible because the copyright for the original stories and related illustrations by EHShepard entered the public domain in the United States in 2021, 95 years after their first publication. This means that anyone is free to use the characters and stories in their own works without obtaining permission from the copyright holder.

And writer-director Rhys Frake-Waterfield chose the moment to make a movie about Pooh and other inhabitants of Hundred Acre Wood psychopathic murders. The movie was said to be a retelling of the stories. In this adaptation, it's revealed that Christopher Robin and his animal friends did have all those adventures during Robin's childhood, but as he grew up and went to college, the animals became increasingly hungry and feral. Eventually, they became so deranged that they terrorise a group of girls who are staying in a rural cabin.

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Frake-Wakefield explained the synopsis in his own words in an interview with Variety. He said, “Christopher Robin is pulled away from them, and he’s not [given] them food, it’s made Pooh and Piglet’s life quite difficult... Because they’ve had to fend for themselves so much, they’ve essentially become feral. So they’ve gone back to their animal roots. They’re no longer tame: they’re like a vicious bear and pig who want to go around and try and find prey.”

Here are some of the reviews:

Rolling Stone's Miles Klee wrote, "Blood and Honey is a hundred-acre wasteland, a witless gory bore, and in the end, you’re just depressed that anyone spent time working on it."

New York Times' Kyle Turner wrote, "It’s not funny enough to have anything clever to say about its gag, and it’s not exciting enough to be a competent horror movie."

The Wrap's William Bibbiani wrote, "The film feels half-written, and the half we got wasn’t the good half. Characters and storylines pop up out of nowhere, disappear into the ether, and almost all of them turn out to be pointless."

IGN's Matt Donato wrote, "Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey is noteworthy only for its name, as it turns out that blending slasher blood with Pooh’s honey together is like oil and water: it just doesn’t mix."

Mashable's Jason Adams wrote, "Disney's cartoon drawings had more character in one swoop of pencil line than any of these women are given before they start getting their faces mashed into wood chippers and their tops torn off."

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