Slasher is back in honey – Weekend – Kommersant

Reece Freak-Waterfield’s Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey is a theoretically clever attempt to turn Alan Milne’s heroes into nightmare characters. True, in the end, a director who shoots two films a year (with titles like “The Killer Tree”) is unlikely to please those who are tired of the dominance of teenage stories and miss 18+ projects.

Text: Alexey Filippov

At first, the Internet giggled happily. Hardcore horror with Alan Milne characters? Give me two (by the way, the continuation of “Blood and Honey” has already been announced). The promo shots also promised unbridled fun: the ugly grimaces of Vinnie and Pyatak (sic!), similar to a mask from Carpenter’s Halloween, fit perfectly into the usual views of the genre. A gloomy forest, an abandoned barn, an illuminated pool, a window behind half-naked maidens. Yes, horror has changed somewhat in half a century, but this is just a high-concept: a slasher plus a favorite bear of many generations. Disney would never show you this, and since Winnie the Pooh and everything has been in the public domain since January 1, 2022 – that is, the copyright yoke on Milne’s legacy no longer appears – then why not.

So, once Christopher Robin met in the Hundred Acre Forest the so-called hybrids with the names Owl, Rabbit, Donkey, Pyatak and Winnie. He spent all his childhood in the company of these strange creatures, feeding them and involving them in games, and then it was time to go to college – and the young man left. The hybrids starved, ate the Donkey – and became somewhat confused in their minds, harboring a bloody resentment against a particular person and humanity in general. Five years later, Robin (Nicholas Leon), who has studied to be a doctor, will return to the forest with his wife – and will no longer find childhood friends, but wild creatures.

The anamnesis of the future massacre in Blood and Honey is revealed in the prologue, stylized as a drawing with a black pen in a notebook. A decision in the spirit of a bored student – or a psychoanalyst unraveling yet another childhood trauma. The reality turns out to be more prosaic: the return to the Hundred Acre Wood is arranged with unhealthy haste, which betrays not even low-budget production, but sometimes outright amateur performances. All subsequent events will develop as if at a speed of x2, a whole line with five girlfriends who came to rest in a cottage remote from civilization will wedge into Robin’s disassembly with the past, and only disturbing music, similar to the track on demand “horror” in the free audio library. The show-stopper murders, for which slashers in the old days were forgiven for any sins, are also absent: director and screenwriter Rhys Frake-Waterfield reproduced popular clichés at best, but for the most part simply portrayed something slurred.

Here it is worth clarifying that the new “Winnie the Pooh”, no matter how much it refers to the “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” (1974), “Halloween” (1978), “Friday the 13th” (1980) and almost “Candyman” (1992), is actually the heir to the exploitation work of Roger Corman and studios like Troma and Asylum. The only difference is that the outrageousness and non-conventionality of ultra-budget trash cinema allows you to spit on decency and motivation for the sake of insane fiction. Shark tornado! Human Centipede! Killer clowns from outer space! “Blood and honey” on this field looks just as restless as in the logic of modern horror, which they try to call either “smart”, then “post”, then “elevated”. Although the key feature of the “new horror” is that they are filmed (and watched) by people who know and love the genre. As a result, they speak out what was previously hidden in symbolic figures and a successful combination of (subconscious) fears of the moment. The entire American Horror Story by Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk consists of an expensive retelling of cheap tropes deciphering the main neuroses of the decade, and Ty West in 2022 shot two whole slasher films from different post-war eras – “X” and “Pearl” – about the blood connection media, violence and floating boundaries of reality.

It is all the more noticeable and surprising that the Briton Freke-Waterfield inside the film sometimes cannot connect two adjacent scenes – not like Milne’s interwar escapism and slasher iconography. By inertia, the thoughts of Winnie and Pyatak turn into abstract rednecks from a fairy forest, who either kill out of natural cruelty, or try to drive out unwanted guests, or start eating or stocking them for a future meal.

A separate question is why the hybrids, armed with fangs, claws and even an obedient swarm of bees, also needed a machete with a sledgehammer (Pyatak walks with the latter, by the way – even here the poster is deceiving). However, the massive symbol of the slaughterhouse overshadows everyone and everything in the film: this is both a rare meaningful move and confirmation that Freke-Waterfield does not philosophize craftily, and if he philosophizes, then with a hammer. Finally, the sledgehammer opens a “portal” to an equally foul reality on this side of the screen, where the motivation, humanity, and intentions of the problem are even worse than those of a B-movie.

At the box office from February 15

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