Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey is a roaring carnival of witless bullshit. There are issues on this film which defy any sane classification: merely saying them out loud makes you appear as when you’re confessing to some crime or different. At about 15 separate factors in the course of the film, your thoughts will whisper ‘can everybody else see this, or have I completely snapped? Am I lifeless?’. Within the Silent Hill 2 remake, when James finds that tape, this will probably be what he sees.
There’s a piece with a swimming pool which is, and I’m not being over-the-top right here, the stupidest factor I’ve ever seen. Pooh – PIGLET – drives a BMW Property, which sounds mundane (the place’s he going after he kills all these individuals, the driving vary?) till you say it out loud and surprise when you’ve by accident seen one thing solely the crew of the Occasion Horizon have been meant to. Go on, say it out loud. ‘Pooh drives a BMW Property’. Over somebody’s head, granted. Does that make what I am saying higher? WHAT ON EARTH ARE YOU ON ABOUT, MATE. See it instantly.
Whilst you’re there, after everybody within the cinema has sliced open their thumbs right into a petri dish to show to one another, regardless of their life decisions, that they’re actual individuals, you could start to note what looks like a pervasive affect on Blood and Honey: Resident Evil 4. Once more, that sounds weird, however we’re right here now. Go together with it.
Ascribing intent to filmmakers is all the time harmful, and will often be averted. Historical past is affected by critics hanging their hats on theories after which being informed it was truly funds considerations, or taking pictures schedules, which knowledgeable particular decisions, not any overt homage. And if I’m incorrect, properly, that’s superb. But when Blood and Honey wasn’t meant to reference Resi 4, then I don’t know the way it ended up like this.
At first, you suppose it’s only a coincidence. In any case, it’s a slasher film, and it’s not like Resident Evil 4 wasn’t stealing from Lucio Fulci or Tobe Hooper, or that exact Friday the thirteenth film the place Jason hasn’t fairly acquired his wardrobe sorted out but and wears a bag over his bonce. And it’s not like Resi 4 invented forests both, or the truth that going into them all the time appears to finish badly.
Then, nonetheless, you see a personality do one thing you’ve completed 1,000,000 occasions earlier than: smashing open a suspiciously familiar-looking crate. You realize, the kind that may comprise some provides or, typically, a snake. When this occurred, I turned to the individual I used to be watching it with, who actually works for a online game writer (he’s not my uncle), and stated ‘did you see that?’ They did, they usually thought the identical. That conspicuously-placed truck (embedded above) seems acquainted, as properly. Hope there aren’t any Spanish coppers about.
Issues escalate from there, as a result of whereas typically a crate is only a crate, and the truck isn’t notably egregious, it’s a bit of more durable to clarify the showdown in a barn which appears similar to the Bitores Mendez boss struggle the place he transforms into no matter that factor is, full with chains hanging down from the rafters. Many, many occasions in the course of the screening I requested myself if I used to be imagining what I used to be seeing, so it wasn’t uncommon to show to my buddy and ask such issues, however – once more – the consensus was it was very shut.
Issues get clearer, nonetheless, in one of many film’s uppermost demented scenes. Up till this level, the plot has trundled alongside as anticipated. Properly, not the Winnie-the-Pooh half, however nonetheless. It’s customary slasher fare: a bunch of younger and (in some circumstances) deliberately underdressed ladies head to a home in screaming distance of the Hundred Acre Wooden. Maria, the lead and ‘ultimate lady’ is struggling to get well from her nightmarish experiences with a stalker, and in order you’d count on the pure factor to do can be to get out of city and hand around in a spooky outdated forest.
Sadly for the ladies, Winnie and Piglet have (after Christopher Robin abandons them to go to uni quite than, , hang around with speaking animals) gone mad and became some hybrid man-beast bonanza of bollocks. They killed Eeyore, and now they’re routinely killing individuals who get near their lair. This explains the place they acquired the BMW from, I believe. I’m unsure Winnie-the-Pooh’s papers are precisely so as, however on this film you merely can’t inform.
Anyway, as soon as the killing actually begins and the ladies realise they’re being hunted by the world’s biggest argument for copyright regulation, they panic. However wait! There’s a plan. In a scene so ridiculous that it’s clearly meant to be a joke (although none of the remainder of the film actually helps it: it’s not deliberately humorous aside from possibly this half), she exclaims that she has forgotten in regards to the gun she introduced along with her.
There are some things to interrupt down right here. Firstly, if my buddies have been being ruthlessly slaughtered after which I came upon another person within the occasion had a secret gun, I’d be a bit irritated. However then I’d in all probability begin asking questions, corresponding to: how did you get a handgun in England? Positive, the nation has its issues, however straightforward authorized entry to firearms just isn’t one in all them. Discovering a gun retailer right here is like discovering a British Prime Minister who didn’t go to Oxford: troublesome, time-consuming, and in the end quite futile.
Then you definitely see the weapon in query. Look acquainted?
At this level, after I ended laughing like a drain, I puzzled if she was simply actually good at Mercenaries.
The similarities don’t finish there, however as I used to be watching the movie I did begin to surprise about simply how a brand new era of filmmakers may need been influenced by the Hollywood-guided cutscenes within the video games they grew up enjoying. In any case, when individuals see one thing which is impressed by one thing else, or a parody or pastiche of it, that usually turns into the muse of their preliminary understanding of it, not the precise supply. instance of this, for me a minimum of, is how the Tommy Lee Jones character on this gag from The Simpsons delivers the well-known ‘I don’t care’ line in a a lot, a lot completely different manner than within the precise film: having seen The Simpsons model first, the precise supply by Lee Jones by no means felt fairly proper.
Blocking, path, lighting, framing, mise-en-scene (one for the beret crowd there): a few of the new faculty of administrators and DoPs appear to attract from video games in how they see movie, in an ouroboros-like suggestions loop. Blood and Honey’s path comprises a number of situations the place you possibly can take the body out and plonk it right into a recreation cutscene and it might simply work. In a manner, it’s oddly becoming, in Blood and Honey a minimum of: there are photographs with an over-the-shoulder vibe that are very Resi 4, and it’s laborious to overstate simply how vital that digital camera angle was to the sport’s success – and the business as a complete – when its imitators confirmed up.
With the success of The Final of Us TV present – and the continued raid on video video games IP for variations with a pre-baked viewers – we’re prone to see extra of it creep in. This doesn’t make it or unhealthy factor, in fact: extra that it’s attention-grabbing to see a medium which was typically derided for copying movie discovering itself influencing movie. That is most prevalent within the feeling that some framing feels such as you’re ready for the cutscene to finish and the digital camera to maneuver nearer to the characters as you are taking management, little doubt completed intentionally right here.
I wasn’t anticipating to suppose these items after seeing Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey, however then I haven’t thought of anything aside from that factor since I noticed it. It can run without end, like The Room, and, properly, you may’t argue with that.
