All together now:
Winnie-the-Pooh,
Somehow you just knew,
A scary movie version was the wrong approach, and
Winnie-the-Pooh,
The idea’s at least new,
Willy, nilly, still he’s now a misogynist killer.
On the chill stroke of midnight, 31 December 2021, AA Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh went out of copyright and, like a demon from an open grave, a worryingly bad idea flew out into the world: a horror version of AA Milne’s Winnie the Pooh. Well, here it is, promising to do for Brit horror what Sex Lives of the Potato Men did for Brit comedy, with a terrifying combination of not-scary and not-funny, and a cast of Love Island types on Xanax apparently reading the dialogue off an optician’s chart held up behind the camera.
What we really need to see is not the film, but the pitch meeting – or in fact the meeting before the meeting. Hidden cameras should have been set up at a central London members’ club where no one is fussed about people going into the toilets two at a time. A lightbulb goes on over someone’s gurning face and they gibberingly announce the idea for an irresistible subject/treatment disconnect: Winnie the Pooh (cutesy kids’ entertainment) plus horror (supercool violent and hilarious). But the OMFG factor is sky high for the wrong reasons.
As it happens, the resulting film doesn’t show the smallest observant interest in the actual Winnie-the-Pooh material. There’s nothing here to show that, like many children’s stories, it has something potentially disturbing about it. Or that maybe AA Milne’s PTSD after the first world war – a complicated determinant factor in his famous creation – does indeed speak to the horror experience. But look, if the people involved in this film aren’t that interested in Winnie-the-Pooh, I don’t blame them. I’ve always found the allegedly adorable bear incredibly stupid and boring. But why do it?
An elaborate backstory claims that the creatures of Hundred Acre Wood came to depend on little Christopher Robin’s visits, both for the food and the love he brought them. But then he grew up and went away, and this betrayal turned them all into embittered, feral and cannibalistic monsters, who actually ate Eeyore, which I guess gave him something to be miserable about. (It is an amusing idea but one which, like everything else, dies in the cack-handed execution.) Some time later, a young woman called Maria (Maria Taylor) who is getting over a horrible incident with a stalker, rents a house in the wood with half a dozen or so friends for a restorative weekend, and encounters the murderous Pooh and Piglet.
The awful truth is that this is a generic derivative horror script: Pooh and Piglet could just as well be creepy guys wearing Pooh and Piglet masks menacing semi-clothed young women. There’s even a ramshackle petrol (or rather “gas”) station in the woods whose owner bafflingly speaks with a hillbilly American accent. And for the ultimate insult – those worried about spoilers and sexist detail had better look away now – there’s not even a Final Girl comeuppance. Spoon some arsenic in that honey and start eating.
• Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey is released on 10 March in UK and Irish cinemas, and on 20 March on digital platforms
