What happens when a loveable, cuddly icon, a mainstay of children's entertainment for decades enters the public domain? If you're Winnie the Pooh, someone leaps on the opportunity and makes a bloody, brutal horror movie in which you and best pal Piglet go on a killing spree. The full trailer for Winnie The Pooh: Blood And Honey is now online.
The basic setup for this one is that Christopher Robin (Nikolai Leon) effectively abandoned his Hundred Acre Wood pals to go off to college. And when he returns with fiancee Mary (Paula Coiz), he discovers the terrible truth of what happened.
"Because they’ve had to fend for themselves so much, they’ve essentially become feral," writer/director Rhys Waterfield tells Variety. "So they’ve gone back to their animal roots. They’re no longer tame: they’re like a vicious bear and pig who want to go around and try and find prey."
With Pooh played by Craig David Dowsett and Piglet by Chris Cordell, no one will mistake this for a Disney movie. Which is good from a legal standpoint, since the Mouse House still owns certain characters and concepts of the Pooh stories.
"When you try and do a film like this, and it’s a really wacky concept, it’s very easy to go down a route where nothing is scary and it’s just really ridiculous and really, like, stupid," Wakefield says of his low-budget horror. "And we wanted to go between the two."
Blood And Honey has a distributor but is awaiting a release date.