After how much I railed against last year’s trend of filmed fanfiction, I guess I’m in no position to be surprised that a slasher movie starring Winnie The Pooh and Piglet made its way into cinemas. Only this is a more literal example of such things than the Dracula self-insert of The Invitation or the myriad of Fifty Shades Of Grey-inspired releases. With the original A. A. Milne book entering the public domain at the start of 2022, this is about as direct as a story like this can get, showing Winnie and Piglet going on a murderous rampage after Christopher Robin abandons them. However, while I went into this more than willing to hear it out as a blatantly weird idea for a film, there are oh-so-many glaring problems with this whole thing.
For a start, the film looks absolutely terrible. Vince Knight’s digital cinematography leaves everything with this sterilised grey tinge to it which sucks out a lot of the potential fun of seeing a giant anthropomorphic pig beating in some poor sap’s head with a sledgehammer. Then again, the effects work does that well enough all on its own as, while the practical effects are decent enough, the CGI blood here… I mean, even by the standards of computerised blood, this is hideous, and managed to pull me right out of the moment every single time it showed up. It doesn’t help that the kills themselves are nothing special, save for some odd bits of homegrown technology in Winnie’s abode that allow for a literal blood shower. And for added letdown, when we get to the finale and we get the big ‘dramatic’ moment when Winnie finally speaks (there’s an odd bit of worldbuilding where the residents of the Hundred Acre Wood pledge never to speak again for… reasons), I couldn’t even make out what he said because the sound mixing is so uniformly shit.
There’s also the characters… or, rather, there would be if there were any in this thing. The film opens with the origin story for this film’s version of the Hundred Acre Wood (rendered in pen drawings that work out surprisingly well), and then has Christopher Robin and his wife as the opening kills. But for most of the film, we follow a non-descript group of college-aged women who stay in a cabin near the Wood, and it is mesmerising just how flat they all are. Textually, I mean; with how leering the framing gets at times, I’m sure these actresses were cast on the size of their talents. They’re all given scraps of characterisation to work with (the lead girl is recovering from trauma to do with a stalker, another is a chronic Instagram user, two others are in a same-sex relationship, and the last one just seems to exist), but nothing comes from any of it. To say nothing of poor Christopher Robin, who proffers an interesting meta idea about the corruptibility of childhood nostalgia, but who is given even less identity than the core group.
All signs point to the filmmakers hedging their bets on the main concept, of Winnie The Pooh as a slasher villain, to carry this film… but even that doesn’t work right. The masks used for Winnie and Piglet are just-okay, and while Piglet is as generic as a slasher villain gets, Winnie only manages to stand out because he’s a seeming collage of a bunch of random bits and pieces from other slasher villains. The personal connection to Christopher Robin plays out like Halloween with a hangover, his position as an in-universe ‘freak’ living in the Wood is a bit Wrong Turn meets Texas Chain Saw Massacre (right down to the prominent use of a meathook in one scene), and he can control bees like Candyman. The only real use of the IP here is with the honey dripping off of Winnie’s face, which admittedly is sufficiently gross and makes him a bit more intimidating than he looks otherwise, but again with the Candyman cribbing, that still feels rather generic.
Look, I’m not sitting here expecting a masterpiece from this thing. While I admit that the lack of focus on the idea of nostalgia disappoints me somewhat, what really gets to me is this film’s inability to focus on much of anything. It’s like a deliberate attempt to make a so-bad-it’s-good movie, except it lacks the actual film craft of something like Willy’s Wonderland, or enough understanding of what taste even is to deliberately offend it like The Greasy Strangler, or even the conviction of The Banana Splits Movie. The most inspired aspect of this entire production is composer Andrew Scott Bell using a violin full of honeycomb to make the soundtrack, but even that doesn’t really show through in the final product.
I mean, I won’t pretend that I didn’t chuckle quite a bit while watching this, because the production values and the acting (oh dear Dude, the acting in this is unreal levels of bad) are just that ridiculous, but they weren’t fun chuckles. I saw this in a decently-full cinema, but there was no real sense of collective fun at the film’s expense because, quite frankly, it is nowhere near interesting or insane enough to make that work. Because it’s so adamant in taking the premise as seriously as possible (save for the opening credits, with its riff on Teddy Bear’s Picnic and a reference to ‘Bear Man Pig’, just in case this didn’t look enough like a half-remembered South Park gag), there’s no charm to it. As a result, there really isn’t much entertainment value, ironic or otherwise, to be gotten out of this.
Because this film has made its budget back several times over, the plans for a sequel along with an expanded universe with equally-demented takes on Bambi and Peter Pan are likely going to go ahead. Chances are they will also make their way to cinemas over here, and yeah, I’ll likely end up writing about those as well. But if they’re going to keep banking on these high concept edgelord fanfic slashers, they had better actually do something with them.
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