Disney and other fairytale characters have been entering the public domain over the past couple of years, and independent film studios have wasted very little time in pouncing on the opportunity to develop horror parodies featuring familiar faces from beloved children's classics.
Last year's Winnie-The-Pooh: Blood and Honey actually proved to be a relatively big hit at the box office, but the same can not be said for the critical reception that awaited it.
The movie was pretty much universally reviled by critics, and ended up being hit with one of the worst Rotten Tomatoes scores of all time at just 3%.
Director Rhys Frake-Waterfield was asked about the reviews during an interview with SFX, and had the following to say in response.
"To be honest, you've got to have a really, really thick skin to be a filmmaker because you get heavily, heavily criticized regardless of the means and the resources you have. When your film is out there like that, it literally gets directly compared to Marvel films, even though you're on 0.01% of their budget. We probably didn't have their catering budget!"
"They're substantially different," he continued. "But because of the scale Winnie went to, a lot of the critics did almost like-for-like comparisons."
In fairness, we're not sure anyone was comparing Blood and Honey to any Marvel movie! Despite the negative reviews, the original did well enough to warrant a sequel, though no reviews have been shared online yet.
During a recent interview with THR, director Frake-Waterfield was asked about Pooh's new look and what fans can expect from the sequel in general.
"Number two is better than number one in every single aspect. Because we’ve gone into this knowing on what platform scale it’s going, whereas in the first one, we didn’t really have much of an idea. We obviously didn’t expect it to go to the masses it did. This time we’ve gone into it knowing that will happen, so a lot more time can be dedicated towards it. I’ve not really worked on anything else this year. And that’s why all areas are now a massive jump up compared to the first. For example, the look of the creatures is quite an important thing. Before we had a mask bought online, some cleaning gloves from the shop downstairs and a red lumberjack shirt from Amazon. The whole monster was about £630 ($770). But this time we have people doing the prosthetics — it’s a company that has worked on Harry Potter’s Voldemort and Star Wars. And they’ve been in charge of the redesigns of the creature. And that’s why Pooh looks a bit more scary. There’s an extra level of detail there. "
You can check out the teaser for Blood and Honey 2 below.
"Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey is a 2023 British independent slasher film edited, produced, written and directed by Rhys Frake-Waterfield. It serves as a horror reimagining to A. A. Milne and E. H. Shepard's Winnie-the-Pooh books and stars Craig David Dowsett as the titular character, and Chris Cordell as Piglet, with Amber Doig-Thorne, Nikolai Leon, Maria Taylor, Natasha Rose Mills, and Danielle Ronald in supporting roles. It follows Pooh and Piglet, who have become feral and bloodthirsty murderers, as they terrorise a group of young university women and Christopher Robin when he returns to the Hundred Acre Wood many years later after leaving for college."
Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey 2 is now playing.