Winnie the Pooh horror movie gets savaged in brutal first reviews
Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey played for one night only in US cinemas this week, which means critics have had their say on the silly slasher.
Written and directed by Rhys Frake-Waterfield, the action follows a feral and murderous Pooh and Piglet, who were abandoned in the Hundred Acre Wood by Christopher Robin.
It's even getting a sequel, but the initial reactions to this horror movie, which we've cobbled together below, have been less than kind with a Rotten Tomatoes score of 9% at the time of writing.
Related: Winnie the Pooh horror movie confirms UK release in cinemas
The Wrap
"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. Rules are established and broken. Up is down, cats are dogs, and a straight-to-VHS quality horror movie is somehow in theaters."
Variety
"While it would be nice if this film's windfall improves the quality of its producers' future projects, that fluke pop-culture awareness is unlikely to occur again – certainly not among viewers who'll still be chagrined at having paid actual money to see a movie this amateurish."
Related: Winnie the Pooh horror movie Blood and Honey gets bloody first trailer
Polygon
"So straight-faced and unrelievedly grim that the audience is inevitably being set up to laugh at it instead of with it. There's no theme to Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey, no bigger idea at work, and barely even a story.
"There's nothing in it you can't get from a trailer or the poster, except the screaming and the blood – and for '70s exploitation fans, a sequence where a woman improbably gets her shirt ripped off in a fight, so she goes to her bloody death topless."
The AV Club
"It all ends very abruptly, and because so much happens at night, not every kill is clear. The gore, however, is ample, while the nudity involves Pooh gratuitously tearing off one victim's shirt.
"That, along with the fact that most of the violence is male on female, may alienate some viewers, though it wasn't made for them. This isn't any kind of elevated horror, and barely has any plot. But it never pretended otherwise."
IndieWire
"Blood and Honey feels like a throwback to a simpler era of filmmaking. Not an era where movies were better – because it's not particularly good – but a time when a film could be produced, marketed, and turn a profit just by promising audiences an image they hadn't seen before.
"The film punches above its weight on craftsmanship, with decadently gory strangulations and decapitations that could have been ripped from a much more expensive production."
Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey hits UK and Irish cinemas on March 10.
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