ΡΟΟΗ TIMES TWO

HONEY? TRAP. BEAR? BACK. DON'T GO DOWN TO THE WOODS TODAY WINNIE-THE-POOH RETURNS...

- ROBBIE DUNLOP

WHEN WORD HIT THE internet that the latest inductee to the public domain, AA Milne's beloved Winniethe-Pooh, was to be reinvented as a Michael Myers-esque slasher villain in a horror film, everybody had an opinion.

For some, the very thought of Winnie-ThePooh: Blood And Honey was enough to trigger the instantaneous destruction of their childhoods. Others were hungry to see the cuddly bear slicing and dicing unsuspecting visitors to the Hundred Acre Wood.

In either case, the grisly new Winnie-the-Pooh became a viral sensation. Nobody was more surprised than writer, editor, director and producer Rhys Frake-Waterfield, who tells SFX the film was "made for the VOD market, not a worldwide theatrical release. We obviously didn't expect it to blow up in the way that it did!"

Financially, Winnie was a huge success, with screenings at thousands of cinemas - 1,200 in the United States alone - leading to box office takings of over $5 million. Critically, however, the film came in for a jolly good pooh-poohing. It currently scores 3% on Rotten Tomatoes.

"It's a really strange one for me," FrakeWaterfield considers, when asked how he coped with the critical lambasting. "To be honest, you've got to have a really, really thick skin to be a filmmaker because you get heavily, heavily criticised regardless of the means and the resources you have. When your film is out there like that, it literally gets directly compared to Marvel films, even though you're on 0.01% of their budget. We probably didn't have their catering budget! They're substantially different. But because of the scale Winnie went to, a lot of the critics did almost like-for-like comparisons."