Nobody should watch âWinnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey.â
This isnât some moral equivocation about the gory take on this beloved Childrenâs icon, by the way.
The movie is just abjectly awful. Nobody asked for a slasher version of Winnie the Pooh stalking scantily clad women.
And itâs as poorly made, poorly edited, poorly acted and poorly received â outside of a brief window of virality when it was first revealed â as youâve likely heard.
(That hasnât stopped a sequel from getting greenlit, though thatâs more a matter of the creatively bankrupt state of Hollywood â a different rant for a different time.)
Again: Nobody should watch this dreck.
Itâs not for people with functioning brains, people who care about their time, people who have fond memories of Winnie the Pooh, or people who actually appreciate well-made horror cinema.
And it is, without question, certainly not for kids.
So imagine the horrified outcry of students and parents alike when a group of fourth-graders in Miami was shown this filth.
According to WFOR-TV, a Miami K-12 charter school, The Academy of Innovative Education, is deservedly under fire after students were shown a portion of the horror film.
Michelle Diaz, a parent of fourth-grade twins at the school, said her Children were distraught after they âwere exposed 20 to 30 minutesâ to the movie.
The upset mother further alleged that an unnamed math teacher showed Children this movie against their will.
âHe didnât stop the movie, even though there were kids saying, âHey, stop the movie, we donât want to watch this,'â Diaz said.
This entire debacle begs a number of questions, including a rather obvious one asked by the movieâs director, Rhys Waterfield, when he was broached about these traumatized fourth-graders.
âItâs mad, isnât it?â Waterfield said in an interview with Variety. âI think itâs crazy. Because when you watch the film there is no way you can mistake it for a childâs film. Literally in the first 10 minutes, crazy stuffâs happening. And look scary.â
âThey said it went on 20 to 30 minutes. I donât know how it went on that long. I donât know if the teacher put it on and just walked out and left them or if the kids tricked them or something.
âHopefully we havenât ruined these kidsâ childhoods.â
Now, according to WFOR, Diaz said that the students selected the movie.
But as the director alluded to, itâs apparent very quickly that this is not a film meant for kids.
One possible (and bad) explanation for why this movie may have slipped under the radar is that it doesnât adhere to any familiar rating. The film is not rated R or NC-17, but NR or ânot rated.â
But that still doesnât excuse the aggressive negligence of this math teacher.
And neither does that excuse Waterfield from making this degenerate take on a beloved character.
There are no real winners in this story.
Just losers and victims â and the fourth-graders certainly arenât losers.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
