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Movie News: 'Blood and Honey' Puts a Gruesome Spin on Winnie the Pooh UPDATE: Bambi & Peter Pan NEXT!

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I’m all about putting a diff spin on things..even turning good things into the dark side.. but this movie just looks god awful
 
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Piglet is a killer in new 'Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey' trailer

Eeyore is dead and Piglet is a killer in the bonkers new trailer for 'Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey,' a deranged twist on the children's classic.
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Eeyore is dead and Piglet is a killer in the new trailer for Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey

What happens to old childhood toys? Sure, maybe they just sit, rotting away and covered in cobwebs, in the attic. Or maybe they exact revenge for being abandoned by using a sledgehammer to beat someone in a swimming pool. The latter theory is one brought to gory life in the just-released trailer for the upcoming horror movie Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey.

Rhys Frake-Waterfield's film became a viral sensation when news of the its existence broke earlier this year. In a recent appearance on Dread Central's Development Hell podcast, the writer-director confirmed that his flick depicts Pooh and Piglet on a rampage, in part because the two beloved characters entered the public domain in 2022.
"It's definitely Pooh and Piglet — it's not just two people in a mask," he said. "The story is meant to be that they've gone on this onslaught from being kind of enraged by what's happened to Christopher."


So what exactly happened to Christopher Robbin to elicit such madness? "Pooh and Piglet experience a drastic drop in food as Christopher grew up and over the years became increasingly hungry and feral," Rhys Frake-Waterfield explained. "They had to resort to eating Eeyore and then Christopher returns with his wife to introduce her to his old friends, and when that happens they get enraged when they see him, and all of their hatred that they've built up over the years unleashes and they go on this rampage."


Frake-Waterfield also revealed on the podcast that he has already started thinking about a sequel. "Hopefully we can ramp it up even more and go even more crazy and go even more kind of extreme," he said. "I've got lots of twisted and dark thoughts on what I want to put Pooh and Piglet through and what scenarios I want to put them in."
 
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'We were in hysterics': The behind-the-scenes story of viral sensation 'Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey'

How a beloved children's character became the villain of one of 2023's must-see slashers, the low-budget 'Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey.'
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'We were in hysterics': The behind-the-scenes story of viral sensation Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey

How a beloved children's character became the villain of one of 2023's must-see slashers.
By Clark CollisFebruary 09, 2023 at 01:00 PM EST




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Filmmaker Rhys Frake-Waterfield grew up loving Winnie-the-Pooh.
"I reckon everyone did," says the 31-year-old Brit. "I remember getting played a lot of the cartoons and stuff when I was younger. He's appeared throughout my life. You always kind of hear about him, and he's always floating around in different areas, in merchandise and things like that."
'Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey'

| CREDIT: ITN STUDIOS/JAGGED EDGE PRODUCTIONS
These days, Frake-Waterfield has a new reason to feel fondly toward the honey-loving creation of writer A. A. Milne and illustrator E. H. Shepard. His horror film, Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey, posits a world in which the titular bear and his pal Piglet have become homicidal monsters.

After the project was announced last year, the micro-budgeted, star-free film became a viral sensation. When imdb.com released a list of 2023's most-anticipated films, Frake-Waterfield's movie placed second, below Barbie but above Killers of the Flower Moon, Oppenheimer, and The Little Mermaid. Last month, Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey opened in Mexico, where the film cracked the box-office top five. The movie will be released in nearly 1500 theaters come Feb. 15.
"It's been getting this demand from all these other territories," says the director. "I've been getting messages from China, Russia, everywhere, asking for it."
The success of the film is doubly remarkable given that, until recently, Frake-Waterfield was toiling in a very different industry.
"I worked in corporate strategy for an energy company," he says. "I used to work on making the economic case for nuclear power stations. I did it eight or nine years. I made the decision that I wanted to do something different and try going into this industry, because I was having a lot of good ideas."

In 2020, Frake-Waterfield founded Jagged Edge Productions with another young filmmaker, Scott Jeffrey. Over the past couple of years, the pair have released a string of low budget movies, often horror films, like Frake-Waterfield's sci-fi movie The Area 51 Incident (Tagline: "Scream all you want") or the Jeffrey-directed Spider in the Attic (Tagline: "There's nothing itsy-bitsy about it").
The journey to the Hundred Acre Wood (a.k.a. a certain bear's fictional home) began at the start of 2022 when Frake-Waterfield learned that Milne and Shepard's 1926 book Winnie-the-Pooh, the collection of stories which introduced Pooh, Piglet, Eeyore, and Christopher Robin, had fallen into the public domain. This development meant he was able to feature the characters in a movie as long as he didn't ape their subsequent, famous representations in the Disney-produced animated shorts, shows, and features.
"We always want to pick something that's very hooky," says Frake-Waterfield of the films made by Jagged Edge. "We want to create a product which instantly stands out and when people see it they go: What the hell is that? I'm a massive horror fan. When I knew that was in the public domain, suddenly the sparks started flying. I was like, I'd love to see that. I'd love to see Winnie-the-Pooh as a horror. So we thought, okay, let's just go for it."
Frake-Waterfield set about writing a script which showed the consequences of Christopher Robin effectively abandoning his anthropomorphic friends after reaching adulthood.
"Christopher Robin met Pooh and friends when he was younger and is friends with them as he's growing up," he explains. "He's bringing them food, he's nurturing them, he's making sure they're alright, and they develop this close bond. Christopher has to go to college and he's no longer able to help his young friends survive. As they're becoming more and more feral, the food supply continues to decrease, and it gets to a point where they eat Eeyore in order to survive the harsh winter. The process of eating their friend has made them really mentally twisted. Christopher Robin comes back, later in life, trying to convince his wife that he's not insane and his friends are not imaginary. He goes searching for them, and he comes across them, and they're no longer anything like he remembered. And it becomes a bloodbath."
'Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey'

| CREDIT: ITN STUDIOS/JAGGED EDGE PRODUCTIONS
The filmmaker decided to depict the all-grown-up versions of Pooh and Piglet as large, menacing figures, partly to help give the film the vibe of a slasher movie and also to put distance between his depictions of the characters and Disney's animated versions.
"I tried to make sure I didn't go anywhere near Disney," says Frake-Waterfield. "Disney have their their own interpretation of Winnie the Pooh. We're not trying to copy their IP, we're not trying to take their brand or anything like that. I wanted to make something that was just so vastly different from them that you can barely tell they're linked, except by name. And I'm pretty sure that's what we've got now. If you saw the massive Winnie-the-Pooh we've got and then the tiny Disney version next to each other, no one's going to confuse the two."
The filmmaker admits it was initially tough to assemble a cast prepared to fulfill his vision.
"It was actually really hard," Frake-Waterfield recalls. "I had approached a bunch of other actors and [said], 'Would you like this role?' And they were like, 'What's the concept?' I told them and they were like, 'No, I don't want to do it.' [Laughs] It was the same with some of the crew. They don't know if it's going to do that well or if it just looks super silly. But I was really passionate about it. I was like, this has a lot of legs and I think this is going to do really well. And, yeah, I found some people who I thought were really good and also actually really liked the concept, thought it was really fun."
The director eventually gathered a cast which included Nikolai Leon as Christopher Robin, Chris Cordell as Piglet, and Craig David Dowsett as Pooh Bear.
"When I was casting for Pooh, I wanted him quite tall," says Frake-Waterfield. "Craig, he's over six foot, he's quite broad as well, so he's got a kind of Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees vibe to him. That's how I wanted Pooh to come across in this."
The filmmaker instructed his actors to tackle their roles with a straight face but admits there were times when even he was unable to hold back the laughter during the shoot.
"We did try and take it all very seriously," he says. "That was one of the directions I gave the actors. I was like, 'I don't want you to kind of treat this like it's going to be humorous, I want you to act like it's deadly serious. The humor is going to come in from the fact that it's Winnie-the-Pooh, you don't have to play into it. [But] everyone, crew and cast, were in hysterics a lot of the time about what was happening. When you're trying to direct a scary scene, and then you look to your right, and there is literally a six-foot-man in a Winnie-the-Pooh outfit listening to you, we would just start laughing at that point."
'Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey'

| CREDIT: ITN STUDIOS/JAGGED EDGE PRODUCTIONS
There was further weirdness to come when the project became a viral sensation after its existence was announced last May.
"Yeah, it was really surreal," says the director. "It went viral just based on the images. We actually put a lot of care into trying to make it look very cinematic and good, and not just a low-effort B-movie. Some films, when they do a concept like this, they just give no craps about the cinematography and it's just some guy in a really average suit. But we did try and make this as cinematic as possible. There was one particular image where we had the girl [actress Natasha Tosini] in the jacuzzi with Pooh and Piglet behind her and that's the one which spread everywhere. Overnight, it just went crazy. I got woken up about four a.m. by the other co-producer. He was like, 'Look at your phone!' Endless stories had been posted about it. I was like, Oh my God, this has gone crazy. I thought, okay, this might just fizzle out, but then it just kept on growing and growing. We released the trailer and people were like, this actually looks good. [Laughs] I think people were expecting a load of rubbish and they were like, this actually looks quite fun to watch. So from there we thought, Okay, let's do some reshoots, make this even better."
Director Rhys Frake-Waterfield

| CREDIT: JAIME NOGALES/MEDIOS Y MEDIA/GETTY IMAGES
That further investment was justified when Frake-Waterfield and his collaborators traveled to Mexico for the movie's world premiere.
"They went full-out," he says. "They had people dressed up as Winnie-the-Pooh, their advertising [department] had someone in the complete costume go into the President's palace there. Just loads of really strange but cool marketing approaches. There was a press junket, red carpet. Myself, the crew and cast, just had probably one of the best days of their lives there."
So Winnie-the-Pooh is big in Mexico?
"Pooh is everywhere," he says. "I went to see some of their ancient tourist sites, and even there there's people selling merchandise and little key rings, and I could see Winnie-the-Pooh. It just made me think, this is literally everywhere, this concept. Everybody knows what Winnie-the-Pooh is."
Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey hits theaters Feb. 15. Tickets can be purchased online at Fathom Events or at participating theater box offices. For a complete list of theater locations, visit the Fathom Events website.
See the trailer for Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey below and exclusively watch a clip from the movie above.
 
How Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey Trolled Its Way to Box-Office Success
By Chris Lee, a Vulture senior reporter who covers Hollywood
“Sometimes the smallest things take up the most room in your heart.” –Pooh Photo: Jagged Edge Productions
Hell hath no fury like a Winnie scorned. In the live-action, R-rated, childhood-nostalgia-desecrating schlock-horror-thriller Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey, A.A. Milne’s erstwhile tubby little cubby all stuffed with fluff is repurposed as a Jason Voorhees–like maniac. One who sets out to avenge his abandonment in the Hundred Acre Wood — by a college-bound Christopher Robin — with the help of Pooh’s partner in savagery, a tusk-toothed, sledgehammer-swinging Piglet. The feral duo go cannibal on Eeyore before turning their murderous attention to any humans in the vicinity. As the bodies pile up, so do the slasher-movie tropes: jump-cut scares, good-looking people getting picked off one by one from a secluded cabin, threatening text delivered via arterial splatter, death by wood chipper, a swimming-pool massacre. With no clear rationale for their savagery, the killing spree arrives as an aggrieved inversion of Pooh’s famous saying: “Sometimes the smallest things take up the most room in your heart.”
Since launching in theaters in Mexico on January 27, the British-produced micro-budget indie has taken in over $1 million: a more than 10X return on its reported “under $100,000” production cost. Hitting 1,500 U.S. theaters on Wednesday en route to a rollout across Canada, Europe, the U.K., Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and 1,300 Latin American screens, Pooh is now poised to become what Variety describes as “one of the most profitable movies in the last decade in terms of budget-to–box office ratio.”

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Viewed another way, however, Blood and Honey can be understood as moviedom’s latest and perhaps foremost triumph of IP by trolling. Its British production company, Jagged Edge, specializes in shot-on-a-shoestring slasher reboots of classic nursery-rhyme, holiday, and mythological properties such as The Legend of Jack and Jill (as hillbilly horror), Curse of Jack Frost (with Christmas demon terror), Tooth Fairy: Drill to Kill (self-explanatory), The Curse of Humpty Dumpty (of the murder-doll genre) and Easter Bunny Massacre: The Bloody Trail. In January of last year, pretty much the moment intellectual rights to Milne’s 1926 Winnie-the-Pooh stories collection entered the public domain — with Disney having lost exclusive rights to the work it has maintained for more than half a century — Jagged Edge’s self-described “Terminator of producing” Scott Jeffries and partner Rhys Frake-Waterfield leapt at the chance to redevelop the material in a decidedly more sinister vein.
There was a petition against us. There were death threats. People were trying to call the police on us at one point.
A photo from the production went unexpectedly viral in May. And ever since, Blood and Honey has benefitted from a kind of “This film is ruining my childhood; I must see it immediately” word-of-mouth buzz quite unlike that of other recent low-budget horror hits such as Barbarian, Terrifier 2, or Skinamarink. “We have 50 percent of the people who love it and are obsessed; the other 50 percent absolutely hate it. They think I’m the devil. I’m pure evil,” says Frake-Waterfield, who marks his feature writing and directorial debut with Pooh. “There was a petition against us. There were death threats. People were trying to call the police on us at one point. So there have been loads and loads of haters. You have to be quite thick-skinned.”
At the outset, Jeffrey (who, according to IMDb, has produced 114 films in the last eight years) and Frake-Waterfield (until a couple of years ago, a corporate strategist at a U.K. energy company who picked up filmmaking through “osmosis” from his college buddy and former roommate Jeffrey) were on a very short list of people who believed a horror-movie Pooh was just stupid enough to become a giant success. The two cobbled together half the movie’s minuscule budget from their personal savings and funded the other 50 percent through frequent collaborator Stuart Alson at ITN Studios (the London-based distribution entity behind such genre fare as Demonic Plastic Surgeon MD, Rocket Hunter: Rise of the Nazi Komet, and American Cannibal).
They knew special care would have to be taken not to run afoul of the notoriously litigious Disney, which maintained rights to Milne’s characters from 1966 to 2022 and still controls a copyright for Tigger (who was introduced in Milne’s second book and has yet to enter public domain) in addition to aspects of the characters’ appearances, such as Winnie’s signature red T-shirt and Piglet’s pink singlet. As such, any violation of trademark law in the Pooh slasher iteration could expect to be met with an immediate cease and desist. “Take the 1926 book and that’s all you’re allowed to work off of,” says Frake-Waterfield. “You can’t watch any of the cartoons. The game of Poohsticks — that’s not in the 1926 book so that can’t be in our version because if we did, that would still be under the ownership of Disney and we’d be encroaching on their brand.”

But even with their legal ducks in a row, and Winnie and Piglet upgraded for grindhouse cinema — the anthropomorphized animals would have hands because “How do you grip a knife with a paw?” — enlisting cast and crew proved more challenging than their previous projects. Below-the-line crew members who had worked on other Jagged Edge productions refused to sign on, claiming the gruesome repurposing of such an established children’s character was a step too far, leaving the filmmakers to hire “fresh out of university” workers, some of whom had never set foot on a film set before. Experienced actors were similarly reluctant to commit. “When you hear ‘Winnie-the-Pooh horror film,’ a lot of people think ‘B-movie trash.’ They think: ‘It’s stupid rubbish and it’s not going to do well. And it’s just basically a waste of my time because it’s not going to get distributed,’” says Frake-Waterfield. “So it took a long time to find people who were willing and could see the potential. They thought it was going to bomb so they just wouldn’t agree to do it.”
Filming took place over ten days in 2022 with East Sussex’s Ashdown Forest standing in for the Hundred Acre Wood. Budget restrictions required entire sequences to be choreographed on the spot, such as an indoor swimming-pool axe-murder scene (the ceiling was so unexpectedly low, Chris Cordell, the actor portraying Piglet, was forced to split his victim’s skull with a sidearm strike rather than a top-down attack). Another character is seen being fed into the aforementioned wood chipper simply because the filmmakers came across the mulching equipment while filming at a rented farm location. “It makes a really interesting death,” explains the director, who produced the film, oversaw its VFX, and operated camera drones in addition to having written Blood and Honey.
Once principal photography wrapped, the film’s creative quorum expected a straight-to-DVD release in keeping with so many other Jagged Edge-ITN collaborations before it. But around Memorial Day, when that shooting still featuring Pooh (Craig David Dowsett) and Piglet hovering ominously behind a bikini-clad woman (Natasha Tosini) exploded across Twitter, Blood and Honey’s fortunes changed rapidly. It led to a deal with Fathom Events, the specialty distributor known for movie-theater broadcasts of ballet, opera, and Broadway stage shows in addition to multiplex releases of anime, classic movies, and faith-based content such as The Chosen and Left Behind franchises. “This thing had blown up on social media and we were following it. That’s why we acquired it,” Fathom chief executive Ray Nutt says of Blood and Honey. “All over social they’re chattering about Winnie-the-Pooh: some good, some bad. But all of that’s good in my opinion because they’re all going to gather in the movie theater.”
Now and again, I laugh because I think, ‘What have I made? This is ridiculous.’
Although hate-watching is sure to become an inextricable component of the Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey experience, early reviews have taken issue with the movie’s shoddy production values, perceived low-quality acting, and general dourness more than its transgressive treatment of a childhood icon. A Blu-ray.com review calls the movie a “dreary viewing experience with slapdash technical credits and no discernible story.” Australia’s flicks.com, meanwhile, heaps on faint praise, congratulating Blood and Honey for being “taut and trim, visually algorithmic but engineered with just enough sizzle to satisfy its unfussy target audience.” Adds another reviewer on Letterboxd (echoing a common critical refrain): “I feel like for what it’s trying to be … this should have been more fun.”
Given the movie’s tiny negative cost and relatively robust box-office performance to date, it is too late for bad word of mouth to significantly erode its bottom line. Moreover, a Pooh sequel is already in the works, as is Jeffrey and Frake-Waterfield’s next exercises in IP trolling: Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare, another bizarro inversion of a children’s bedtime story set to feature a “heavily obese” Tinkerbell who’s also a recovering drug addict, and Bambi: The Reckoning, in which America’s favorite fawn is reimagined as a “vicious killing machine that lurks in the forest.”
“Now and again, I laugh because I think, What have I made? This is ridiculous,” Frake-Waterfield says with a laugh. “This was a concept which I really, really believed in and really wanted to direct. And despite having a lot of challenges because not a lot of people believed in it and they didn’t think it was a good idea, thought it was going to bomb and that I was wasting my money, blah, blah, blah … it’s really nice now that it’s expanding and doing well. Investors are now starting to contact us!”
 
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'Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey' director says sequel will have at least 5 times the budget

Director Rhys Frake-Waterfield is 'really excited' for sequel to 'Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey.'
ew.com ew.com

Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey director says sequel will have at least 5 times the budget

"I’m really excited for what the second film’s going to do," says filmmaker Rhys Frake-Waterfield.
By Clark CollisFebruary 16, 2023 at 03:06 PM EST




The story of British horror movie Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey is a triumph of micro-budget filmmaking. Reportedly shot for less than $100,000, this tale of Pooh and Piglet all grown-up and running amok recently opened to box office success in Mexico and is currently playing on cinema screens around America.
Predictably, a sequel is already in the works, one which will be made with a substantially larger budget than the first film.

'Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey'

| CREDIT: ITN STUDIOS/JAGGED EDGE PRODUCTIONS
"Number two is already going into development," says Blood and Honey writer-director Rhys Frake-Waterfield. "I'm hoping that, at minimum, it's going to have five times the budget of the first one, but it could be substantially more than that as well, which would do absolute wonders for the film. That's one of the major challenges. It's competing with films like M3GAN [and] they are made on orders of magnitude more. When you have more money for a film, you get more time, you get cooler scenes, you can really spend more time refining things. So I'm really excited for what the second film's going to do."

In addition to the sequel, Frake-Waterfield also has plans to make a horror film centered around the character of Bambi.
"Yeah, Bambi's coming," he says. "Bambi. Pooh 2. [But] I'm looking to find other concepts and other retellings which aren't just IP. Then I'll see the next one I'm going to get fully attached to. Because even though those projects, Bambi and Pooh 2, are happening, it doesn't necessarily mean I'll direct them. I may just be involved, and produce them, and get them moving, but there might be one of these other ideas which I think could do incredibly well, and I think I could give a lot to that project and that concept. So I may get drawn to one of them. I'm still in the stages of thinking about that at the moment."
 
I heard that critics slammed the film with one describing it as "stuffed with fluff" and another referring to it as "silly willy nilly"
 

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