‘Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey 2’ Review: This One Has a ‘Story,’ but Beneath the Slasher Violence Its Only Horror Is What It Does to IP

variety.com:

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic For more than 40 years now, moviegoers have lined up to see the spectacle of people being slaughtered by a psycho with a chainsaw, a psycho in a Halloween mask, a psycho in a goalie mask, a psycho with burnt skin and a striped shirt and fedora, or a psycho with S&M nails in his face.

So why not a psycho Winnie the Pooh? “Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey” raised a few hackles — otherwise known as free publicity — for having the scuzzy temerity to take a couple of beloved children’s characters and place them at the center of a slasher film.

Yet the stunt concept was about all there was to it. The movie, made on a budget of $50,000, was too logy and inept to be a real scandal, or any sort of theatrical sleeper hit. (It opened on 1,652 screens and wound up grossing a total of $1.7 million.) On paper, “Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey” sounded like an extreme TikTok video, yet it was amateurishly staged and badly paced, neither scary nor funny.

A measure of how uninspired it was is that the movie never truly made good on its satirical hook and convinced you that you were seeing killer versions of the legendary characters created by A.A.