Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey 2

No one gives themselves over to Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey 2 than Marcus Massey. The British actor of Indian descent, with a long CV in horror cinema trashwears an elaborate latex costume, topped off with black feathers poorly glued to the surface, to embody the version slasher from Corujão – and every second of him on screen is a delight. Distorting the paternalistic and intellectual figure of children’s books into a kind of gang leader with theatrical tendencies (cough cough) touched upon, he is all expansive gestures, evil laughs and sarcastic comments, lending the sequel a sense of ridiculousness that was sorely missed in the original film.

To your credit, Blood and Honey 2 seems to take its cue, at least in part, from Massey. If you can’t say that all the film is infused with a certain good humor, at least this time the director Rhys Frake-Waterfield understands that his troupe of villains is much more like Rita Repulsa and Ivan Ooze – both anthological enemies of power Rangers – than for Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees. Don’t think he completely abandons his referential tricks (the film’s Tigger, played by Lewis Santeris all coded like the Freddy of the gang), but at least he brings from his micro-budget roots a providential lack of shame, and a willingness to make the most of any spark of inspiration he may have stumbled upon.

This means, mainly, that Frake-Waterfield doesn’t make an effort to hide the clumsiness of the costumes his actors are in – his concern, now that he has a little more money at his disposal, is more about making them look cool than real. It must be admitted that he and his director of photography Vince Knight (the same as the first film) succeed, most of the time. The staging of deaths in Blood and Honey 2 is also frankly superior to what we saw in the first film, exchanging endless chases in slow motion for more shocking outbursts of violence, even though the bet is doubled on goreperformed in the same circus tonal key as Terrifierlooks a little out of place in a franchise where the killer isn’t literally a clown.

The other favor that the director does to the film is to take advantage of the half-goofy, half-melodramatic dynamic between his killers, alongside his new screenwriter. Matt Leslie (Summer of 84), organize the now potential franchise around a theater of social revenge. Right at the beginning, Blood and Honey 2 positions – or rather, tells us directly – that Pooh and Christopher Robin are enemies “who have more in common than they realize”. Both are, after all, ostracized by a society that fears them as monsters (whether this monstrosity is a lie or the consequence of acts that were beyond their control), and both seek to regain their place in this society despite the indifference of institutions and people governed by them. For them.

The plot feels the need to connect them by an even deeper bond, of course, but it’s easy to forgive Blood and Honey 2 by the impulse to spell out their themes, especially if it is to try to position themselves in the same pantheon as a Killer toy or one Halloween, franchises that for decades have shown themselves capable of iconographic social commentary without needing subtlety to do so. The problem is that everything here smells of cynicism, of distraction, of someone hastily grabbing as many respectable ornaments as possible – or, at least, interesting to a specific audience – and hanging them on their ugly Christmas tree, to make up how little foliage it has. it really does.

Because, in the end, Blood and Honey 2 is not interested in rescuing the 90s trash of the power Rangers for a bloodthirsty adult audience, and much less in making provocations about the ethos deprived of solidarity from contemporary social organization. No, this is all distraction. The central idea around which everything is organized is much more vulgar – and not in the sense cute, cult, subversive of the word. This new Winnie-the-Pooh It’s vulgar because it really wants to make a quick change over a concept that is quickly losing its novelty shine, and that allows its director to indulge in the easiest perversions that horror cinema suggests.

At the bottom of any exclamation of surprise at this or that quality that the film demonstrates, therefore, there will always be the bored sigh of someone who has seen it all before.