There was a lot of hype, for lack of a better word, around this movie. Good and bad. Ok, probably about 90-10 leaning towards the bad side. So many thought the very idea of this movie was blasphemous towards such a beloved childhood property. I suppose the “good” side was people saying “Oooh, Winnie the Pooh as a horror movie? I would watch that!” 

So I did. 

Now to be fair, I watched this a year ago when the hype was still rather fresh. I didn’t review it at the time because … well that would be telling. But a few days ago I watched a movie called Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare. And as I was beginning to work on writing a review of that, I saw a reference to it being part of the TCU. The Twisted Childhood Universe as developed by Rhys Frake-Waterfield. Now, I have never heard of the TCU before, but having heard of it, I instantly dove for the rabbit hole. 

And discovered that the first two installments of the TCU are Blood and Honey 1 and 2. With Peter Pan being the third and Bambi: The Reckoning being the fourth. But that’s not all. There are many more movies coming in this TCU. And it kinda feels like a modern day Full Moon universe which was kind of like a (then) modern day Roger Corman universe which was at the time a bit like a (then) modern day Hammer studio universe. But this wasn’t intended to be a history lesson. So back to Pooh!

This movie starts with Christopher Robin taking his fiancee (Mary) to meet the childhood friends. Friends that nobody ever believed were real, but he swears really exist. The 100 Acre Woods though isn’t in the best of conditions, not exactly how Christopher remembers it. He left Pooh and the 100 Acre Woods behind 5 years ago.

Correcting myself a bit here, the movie actually started with an animated intro much like one would expect of a Winnie the Pooh show. But it actually extends to explain what happened when Christopher left his childhood friends behind. They were unaccustomed to feeding themselves, so they ate Eeyore! And essentially decided that all humans were the enemy because Christopher Robin abandoned them.

There is a really quick change here that didn’t make sense to me. It went from “I wanna introduce you to Pooh” to “Someone is coming, we need to hide.” Now Pooh has become really buff (and also really beer belly) and big and scary looking. And between Pooh and Piglet they kill Christopher’s fiancee and capture him to torture. I have to say here that I think the creature designs for Pooh and Piglet suck. Pooh just looks like someone wearing a terrible hard rubber mask and the tusks on Piglet make him look overly menacing and also a bit rubber mask.

The movie then jumps to a group of 5 (sorta 6) women who are going to stay at a vacation type cabin in the 100 Acre Woods. This now turns into a typical killer vs 6 college women slasher movie. Including the first girl (Tina) who sees Pooh from a distance and just decides to scream and run, yet spends ¾ of her time running looking back over her shoulder at Pooh. And then to keep the cliches running, when Pooh grabs her, he rips off her shirt exposing her boobs because she isn’t wearing a bra (of course.) And it stays predictable as they die off one by one (although they also free Christopher and another random girl ) until there are only two of the girls left (and Christopher.) 

The two girls stumble across a pickup truck with 5 dudes in it as they run from Pooh. The girls get in the truck as the dudes surround Pooh with makeshift weapons (bottle, bat, crowbar, sledgehammer…) Pooh lets them wail on him for a couple of hits each until the bottle guy decides to crack him on the back of the head. At which point we discover that Pooh is essentially superhuman, in that he isn’t really affected by any of the attacks. And then he starts fighting back by slapping the face off bottle attacker guy. And even karate chops the hand off a guy. I think Pooh has a knife in hand for these two attacks, but when I was watching it, I didn’t notice it at first. 

We then have a failed car escape scene with Pooh in the back of the pickup, another girl killed, a showdown between Pooh and Christopher with the life of the final girl at stake. As Pooh kills her to spite Christopher, Christopher flees. 

The idea of this movie was cool. I loved the opening animation sequence, but I have to say the creature designs really sink this movie. You can tell the actors probably can’t see a thing as they are very mechanical in their movements. The cliche college girls being killed were boring.

The animation sequence gets a 10 star from me, but everything after that dips so close to zero that it flirts with going negative. I enjoyed the animation so much though that I’m letting this sneak out with a 2 star rating.