Parents' Guide to Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey 2

This horror sequel's budget may be more than 10 times that of the original—and it certainly has higher production values—but in many ways it's so much worse. It's much more callous, thoughtless, and conniving. Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey could have been written off as an accident, a movie that would have gone directly to video/streaming and been forgotten, if not for a bit of controversy. But Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey 2 was made very purposefully, flaunting its disregard for favorite childhood characters while doing nothing with it. It has no message—about nostalgia, about copyright, or about anything. It's an amateur's effort to re-create the goriest stuff from favorite horror movies, using a gimmick that the filmmakers were lucky (crazy?) enough to stumble upon to make the movie sellable. (They promise many more movies in what is now becoming a franchise.)

The filmmaking is rough and rudimentary, with no sense of space, no real scares or humor, or anything viewers are likely to care about. The monsters smash up their human prey so easily—weapons slice through bone and flesh like papier-mâché—that it means nothing. The dialogue ("like pigs to the slaughter!") is excruciating. The only improvement is that the costumes look better; we can now see the creatures' eyes. But absolutely everything is familiar and predictable. You could write off Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey 2 as totally worthless, if not for the danger that kids might accidentally watch it without knowing what really lurks behind it.