A swiftly turned-around sequel to last year’s notoriously lame Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey, this splatterfest horror feature is better than its predecessor much in the same way succeeding Covid variants are better than the early, more lethal strains. One hesitates to dispense any praise lest it encourages the film-makers; then again, the whole mean, bullying spirit of the franchise is to rile critics and “spoilsports” who supposedly don’t get the joke. The gag is to take an innocuous childhood work of fiction and besmirch it, like a nasty older sibling wiping a younger kid’s favourite toy on its bum. YouTube and the meme culture is packed with this kind of “humour” – much of which is free, succinct and often has better production values than this tedious schlock, which just like the last one is neither funny nor scary, despite all the slasher-movie embellishments.
In keeping with contemporary horror films’ obsession with “meta” levels of narration, the setup here posits that the first film is a movie within this movie, which explains why the actor who plays Christopher Robin (perpetually moist-eyed Scott Chambers) is not the same as the one in the previous film (Nikolai Leon). Nevertheless, as the sketched prologue explains, the Hundred Acre Wood massacres in the movie-within-this-movie did happen in this (fictional) world. Piglet, admittedly, was made into bacon in the last round, but no one managed to catch the mutant bear-man Pooh (also recast, played here by Ryan Oliva) who did most of the killing. So the ursine murderer in the latex mask is back, this time accompanied by his similarly red in tooth and claw friends Tigger and Owl. The latter’s dark feathers mean he is at least distinguishable from Pooh and Tigger because in this low-lit world all the monsters looks pretty much the same, like escapers from an am-dram production of Cats who have doused themselves in ketchup.
Writer-director Rhys Frake-Waterfield spends a bit of time building up the world by roping in Simon Callow to play a walking exposition dump. He fills Chris in on the backstory, which involves a Dr Moreau-like evil genius who created the mutants in the first place by experimenting on kidnapped children. That token gesture at creating emotional stakes doesn’t negate the fact that this feels, just like its predecessor, made with sadistic glee in seeing mostly female characters mutilated and violently penetrated with an assortment of phallic weapons, often immediately after being called “bitch”. But that’s all part of the joke, right?
• Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey 2 is in UK cinemas from 7 June.
