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.
Y’know, at the fourth film in, I was honestly expecting the bottom to drop out of this series. Even with how well the After films have been doing at getting increasingly worse, yet increasingly more fun to watch, with each instalment, I thought it would get to a point where the melodrama couldn’t be pushed any harder and we’d start seeing diminishing returns. I mean, even with film series I like for reasons beyond laughing at their expense, it’s rare to see one last this long and still maintain that key engagement factor. And for a little while, it indeed looked like this was where things would start petering out. But then it decided to floor it into a brick wall and further the series trajectory to unleash what is, somehow, the new worst and new funniest entry in the series.
Under normal circumstances, writing about a film like this that hinges on a plot twist would be difficult. As much as I gush over the films I like, and trash the ones I don’t, I try and be careful not to get too specific about what happens in the story. The last thing I want is to ruin the experience for someone else, even if it’s with a film I personally don’t care for. However. Seeing as this film has been marketed so poorly that both its trailer, and the first paragraph of its Wikipedia page (not even the plot synopsis, but the full page), give it clean away, I don’t particularly feel like putting in more effort than the people responsible for bringing this to the public. Although, as we’ll get into, that will be a familiar sensation throughout this review regardless.
What a curious little series this has turned into. The first film is still a garbage fire behind a gasoline refinery, but past that point, these films have basically turned into everything I wanted out of the Fifty Shades series: Silly, phenomenally stupid, but almost endearing in their asininity and willingness to entertain on those terms. And as the third of a proposed four (possibly five) film series, After We Fell is more of the same unhealthy junk food that came before, only it’s lacking in even the most basic of narrative fibre by this point.
