Overview
Christopher Robin is headed off to college and he has abandoned his old friends, Pooh and Piglet, which then leads to the duo embracing their inner monsters.
When the rights to the characters in Winnie the Pooh entered public domain it didn’t take long for someone to jump on the idea of making a horror film about the beloved children’s characters. Unfortunately all it manages to demonstrate is that just because you can do something, maybe, just maybe you should decide not to.
Opening with a sketch-drawn animation style retelling of the Pooh origins – albeit with a darker take – we learn that as Christopher Robin grew older and left for college, his friends at 100 Acre Woods were left to fend for themselves, eventually turning on one of their own through starvation, and becoming murdering shadows of their former selves. When Christopher Robin returns to the woods, with his fiance in tow, to reunite with his old friends he finds them completely changed. After the opening moments have played out, we are introduced to a group of vacationers who have rented a house next to the woods for a break. So begins a generic take on the ‘cabin in the woods’ style of splatter film, only with no budget, no talent, and no idea of what it is doing.
Let’s get this out the way first, had this film leant into the silliness of it all, and opted for a comedy-horror approach akin to great films such as Tucker and Dale, it could have been almost watchable. The concept seems to suggest fun, but instead it opts for a Wrong Turn level of grittiness, and struggles from the start to make you care for any of the protagonists caught up in the mix. It would also have helped had any of the cast attained any semblance of acting talent at any point – this had the genuine level of a primary school nativity approach to acting – or had the script not been packed with some of the tritest dialogue committed to film. Bizarre story choices (all the girls hand their phones in to be “off the grid” yet one suddenly starts taking photos of herself on her phone a couple of scenes later, the inclusion of a hillbilly redneck garage owner in….checks notes…rural England, or a random captive who knows who Pooh and the gang are despite us being told that after Christopher left the animals never spoke again), and some awful environment choices for scenes (a 3am set scene flashback clearly has a lot of bright sunlight behind the curtains of the room), do nothing to help matters, showing an attention to filmmaking that would make a GCSE film studies student struggle to attain a grade!
I could spend the whole thankfully short runtime of this film in tearing it down for every element within, but having already wasted time watching it I don’t want to waste much more time thinking about it. Suffice to say the whole thing is not as fun as the concept would suggest, and even the brutal killings, whilst reasonably presented, have been done so much better elsewhere. Lacking chills, zero thrills, the whole affair feels mundane and a hard slog. On the plus side, any aspiring filmmakers out there can be optimistic that no matter how bad you think your efforts are, you too can get a cinema release!
Feeling like it would have sat well among the other low-rent, brainless fodder that debut on Shudder, this woeful attempt at a cash grab on the public domain rights makes me want to crowdfund to raise money to prevent other old properties from ever landing in the hands of the general public again. Absolute Pooh!