This follow-up to the first Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey finds Cristopher Robin (Scott Chambers) ostracized from everyone in his hometown of Ashdown after they all believe he was responsible for the “Hundred Acre Massacre” in the Hundred Acre Woods depicted in the first film. No one, including his close friends, believes Christopher Robin’s story of what really happened, ultimately resulting in him losing his job as a pediatric doctor. He also has been attending therapy to work through not only the trauma experienced during the massacre but also the loss of his twin brother Billy when he was a kid, who went missing during their birthday party. Meanwhile Pooh, at the coaxing of Owl is looking to take his path of vengeance outside the Woods and into the town, hungering for revenge against Christopher Robin for telling the world about them. And this time, Pooh is bringing along Tigger to revel in the mayhem that is to come.

Blood and Honey II is an improvement over the first film in pretty much every way, with a budget ten times higher than the first movie. The creature effects are a definite step up with Pooh and “friends” looking like actual mutant monsters rather than Halloween Express rejects. In a pretty clever bit of meta-fiction, director Rhys Frake-Waterfield has also replaced the cast of the first film with better actors by essentially treating the first film as a film dramatization of the Hundred Acre Massacre (similar to the Stab franchise within the Scream movies). Scott Chambers as Christopher Robin especially is a VAST improvement over the absolutely dreadful Nikolai Leon from the first movie. Chambers is a legitimate actor who is able to channel emotional anguish over all the trauma Christopher Robin has been through. Even the plot is more involved than the first movie, exploring the lore and origins of the monsters in much more detail. Having said all that, this is still a very meat-and-potatoes gory slasher with a thin script and dumb characters that exist mostly to propel the plot as well as some murky directing in places (although the film isn’t without some pretty cool lighting effects in places too), but considering the $500k budget that Frake-Wakefield was working with and looking at how absolutely awful the first movie was, this actually turned out better than I expected it to be.

The digital transfer provided by Scream Factory here is very nice and clean with no distortion and solid color saturation. It’s a film with many very dark scenes, so having deep and well-balanced black levels is important. The 5.1 surround sound audio track has some nice oomph to it and really shines particularly during the big rave massacre at the climax. There are no extras included at all.

If you would have told me a year ago that I would have been giving a relatively favorable review to a sequel to the abysmal Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood & Honey, I’d have probably called you insane and kicked you in the shins for good measure. And yet here we are! Frankly, don’t go into this expecting high art. But if you do get a kick out of gory, hyper-violent slashers in the vein of the Terrifier movies and want to see a beloved childhood sacred cow brutally butchered, then Blood & Honey II will certainly do the trick.