Having been exposed as nothing more than a one-trick pony of the worst kind after being brutalized by critics to the tune of an embarrassing six percent Rotten Tomatoes score, the excitement and curiosity over what Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey director Rhys Frake-Waterfield will do next has completely evaporated.
The trend for reinventing beloved children’s characters as the stars of gore-soaked slashers is already on life support, but that hasn’t prevented the filmmaker from daydreaming about what he could butcher in the future. In fact, in an interview with ScreenRant, he went as far as admitting that the Teletubbies were on his wish-list, which is something we’d rather not see thank you very much.
“I really want to do like some other crazy ideas like Teletubbies and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, I think that’d be so fun to do. Now, they obviously have an IP, and they obviously have are still in copyright, so it may be a bit of a struggle to do those two concepts.
But I want to try and find stuff like that, I want to find things which I could license, and I could do that are just crazy and wacky and weird, and they’re purely for people just to go and watch a horror movie and just have fun. I don’t want them to be too deep and too serious. I do like watching sort of grounded and elevated horror, but there is a big market for this. A lot of people do want this, they want to go there and just have fun.”
Is anyone genuinely crying out to see Teletubbies given the Blood and Honey treatment? If anything, the critters are scary and unsettling enough on their own without committing onscreen atrocities, but there’s only so much mileage you can get out of a gimmick that’s exceedingly flimsy to begin with before people stop caring anymore.
Then again, looking at how everyone except the most vocal horror fans have been reacting to the honey-loving bear’s latest misadventure, that time may have already come.