Well, here we are again. We watched this last night in the cinema with about 15 other people. Why do I do this to myself? Because I love horror films. Love them. And I wanted so much to enjoy the first Blood and Honey, and I felt scammed. But with the promise of an increased budget and what appeared to be positive things being said about it, I thought I would give it another go.
The budget has been spent on three things. The costumes have been improved upon. And, they have clearly spent a lot on getting Tiktokers to say good things, and the admittedly clever use of marketing.
But, make no mistake, it's bad. I will say worse than the first, because here we can't try to partially blame a low budget. It falls firmly at the doorstep of bad filmmaking.
The director doesn't seem to know how to make a film scary or interesting or look good or get good performances or frame a good shot or create tension or.... Looking at their IMDB it would appear they have made ALOT of films. How is it that they don't know anything about what makes a film work? The writer shows no skill in creating a cohesive story with some muddled backpedaling to the original idea. It's also strangely boring. We didn't walk out like we did the first, as I had heard there was a rave scene at the end of the film. But it's not worth waiting for. Again, no tension, no scare, just some badly rendered gore, weird camera angles, bad lighting, jarring music and, like the first, kills offscreen.
The acting is bad. Here, one of the producers has cast (or rather mis-cast) themselves as Christopher Robin. I think making Christopher Robin a gay character is an interesting and novel idea. But they make absolutely no mention to it whatsoever. They also have a one expression look throughout and the Pooh confrontation is cringe. All the victims can't even scream with any level of believability. The parents for some reason both mumble their way through their lines (as if they received the script two minutes beforehand). And Simon Callow? Please fire your agent, immediately. You used to make good films.
Luckily there are lots of other good horror films on the horizon, made by people who know what they are doing. Another positive is met some nice other horror fans (who also hated this film btw).
But I am out with these. Officially.