Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey 2 Movie Review and Rating

Review: Blood and Honey 2 capitalizes on the infrequent highlights of the first Winnie the Pooh horror movie, and improves around the edges where the original flopped. But despite an infusion of new ideas and kills, the core premise can only go so far. A schlocky, unique time at the movies doesn’t translate into an objectively good film.

blood and honey 2 review winnie the pooh horror film 2024 — Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey 2 (2024)

Yes, I saw the second one. After being mostly unmoved (and slightly agitated) by the shockingly comatose Winnie the Pooh horror movie Blood and Honey that came out in 2023, moderately positive reviews drew me to give Blood and Honey 2 a shot, because how would I ever prepare to see the Poohniverse: Monsters Assemble moviegoing event of a lifetime if I don’t do the homework of seeing the original entries first?

Blood and Honey 2 is perhaps the sequel nobody ever wanted or needed, but it does manage to improve on many of the fronts that caused the original Winnie the Pooh horror movie to crumble. It’s increasingly violent and unpredictable, and leans more into the lore and commonly understood universe that Winnie the Pooh and Christopher Robbin (and supporting characters) live in.

The performances are often silly and overcalculated, but Blood and Honey 2 is held together by string with a central performance from Scott Chambers (as Christopher Robbin) that is surprisingly not as bad as you’d think. He’s dialing it up perhaps too far in a few scenes sprinkled throughout, but the emotional weight only ever shows because he manages to bleed through beyond the cartoonishly rambunctious premise.

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There are quite a few inventive and specific kills to hold you over throughout. If you thought the gore was turned up all the way in the original, the second carves its own path with a few sequences that bookend the movie nicely. There’s a campground scene involving its fair share of broken bones that opens the movie, and a built-out, gnarly rave one that closes it. For what its worth, they play well in a crowd and are among the most crowd pleasing sequences you’ll see in a film of this caliber (which is to say – uninspired).

Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey 2 is too self-serious to get a pass for being trashy horror, and not nearly executed as well as recent camp hits. It’s certainly an improvement over the original movie – paving the way for gorier, more inventive kills and a storyline that at least tries to develop a deeper meaning – but it’s still marginal at best and reeks of a ridiculous concept more than a fully realized horror event. It’s entertaining to poke fun at, but not necessarily revisit.

It’s going to do solid financial numbers because most horror movies do, but I hope franchises like Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey don’t start popping up more often. It’s silly when you have one of these that come out a year, but they’re so low quality and I really want to refrain from this becoming a staple in the industry moving forward. So nobody replicate the Poohniverse. Let them do their own thing!

Rating

Genre: Horror

Watch Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey 2 (2024) in theaters

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