For greater than 40 years now, moviegoers have lined as much as see the spectacle of individuals being slaughtered by a psycho with a chainsaw, a psycho in a Halloween masks, a psycho in a goalie masks, a psycho with burnt pores and 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 just a few hackles — in any other case often called free publicity — for having the scuzzy temerity to take a few beloved kids’s characters and place them on the heart of a slasher movie. But the stunt idea was about all there was to it. The film, made on a finances of $50,000, was too logy and inept to be an actual scandal, or any kind of theatrical sleeper hit. (It opened on 1,652 screens and wound up grossing a complete of $1.7 million.) On paper, “Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey” appeared like an excessive TikTok video, but it was amateurishly staged and badly paced, neither scary nor humorous. A measure of how uninspired it was is that the film by no means actually made good on its satirical hook and satisfied you that you just had been seeing killer variations of the legendary characters created by A.A. Milne. In essence, you had been simply watching a slasher in a rubbery Winnie the Pooh masks that didn’t even appear to be Pooh. (It regarded extra like Christopher Cross.)

And but, in its very existence, “Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey” introduced a courageous new world of the place horror might go. The rights to the Winnie-the-Pooh characters had been owned by the Walt Disney Firm since 1966 (at that time, Disney was consuming up kids’s classics as greedily as Pooh licking out the insides of his honey jar). However the first of the Pooh books, revealed in 1926, entered the general public area within the U.S. on January 1, 2022, and Rhys Frake-Waterfield began taking pictures his horror-hack curio simply three months later.

His huge concept mirrored the kind of factor you used to see in porn movies — after they’re riffs on actual motion pictures and have titles like “Pulp Friction” and “Legally Boned.” “Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey” wasn’t porn, nevertheless it was a form of blood-soaked exploitation cosplay. Its solely actual horror was to reveal how blithely you possibly can cut back cherished IP to trash.

I’d be much less cynical about all this if the “Winnie the Pooh” horror movies had been made with a touch of the transgressive talent that infuses Damien Leone’s “Terrifier” movies. However they aren’t. At coronary heart, they’re generic slasher motion pictures. You might say, as early reviewers have, that “Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey 2” is “higher” than “Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey,” as a result of it’s acquired an even bigger finances and extra story. However story is what Frake-Waterfield and his screenwriter, Matt Leslie, should not so scorching at. The movie definitely sprawls, with extra deluxe lensing than the primary movie, and there’s truly a reputation actor onboard — the traditional ham Simon Callow. Wanting spooked and talking in a Scottish brogue, he explains to Christopher Robin how Winnie the Pooh and his fellow beast creatures acquired that manner. It appears there was some kind of mad physician who kidnapped native kids and infused them with animal DNA. All very “Island of Misplaced Souls,” solely this backstory utterly contradicts the backstory that was advised, in imitation A.A. Milne drawings, within the first movie.

There could also be much more happening “Blood and Honey 2,” however let’s not child ourselves. It’s largely a shambles. One yr after the 100 Acre Bloodbath, everybody within the city of Ashdown blames Christopher Robin for it; they suppose he dedicated it. Why anybody would pin this crime on such a pleasant fellow is past me, and the movie doesn’t actually observe via on that anyway, besides to make the purpose that Chris is now a strolling trauma case. Within the first movie, he was performed by Nikolai Leon, who was truly proper for the half. Now he’s performed by Scott Chambers, who comes on like he’s auditioning to star in “The Ed Sheeran Story.”

There are extra creatures this time, and much more mayhem — extra dismemberings and decapitations and face gougings, particularly throughout the climactic rave sequence, which lays waste to everybody on the dance ground. Pooh (Ryan Oliva), who has been redesigned, nonetheless wears his signature overalls and purple flannel shirt, however his face appears to be like even gnarlier; he now resembles a homicidal model of Jim Carrey’s Grinch. Owl (Marcus Massey) appears to be like like somebody in a royal crow costume out of “Eyes Large Shut” (and speaks in a voice of aristocratic evil), and Tigger (Lewis Santer), who doesn’t present up till that rave sequence, has a face that (for no good purpose) is sort of an identical to Pooh’s. However he’s acquired claws that slash like knives, and his Tiggerish power could be the closest factor right here to a high quality linked to the character of legend.

Rhys Frake-Waterfield is, I suppose, a filmmaker, however actually he’s a British schlock maven who, in 2021, left his job at an power firm to package deal low-budget horror movies. Inside two years, he’d produced 36 options with titles like “The Loch Ness Horror,” “Snake Resort,” “Alien Invasion,” and “Medusa’s Venom.” Someplace up in drive-in-theater heaven, Herschell Gordon Lewis and Ed Wooden are smiling, even when Frake-Waterfield makes them appear to be Scorsese and Spielberg. But there’s no denying that he’s a canny and impressive packager. He has introduced grand plans to launch the Poohniverse, which can embrace such motion pictures as “Pinocchio Unstrung,” “Bambi: The Reckoning,” and “Poohniverse: Monsters Assembled.” I doubt audiences will probably be very unsettled by any of this. However you may guess the IP is trembling.