Director Speaks Out After Teacher Shows 4th-Graders His Bloody Horror Film
Nobody should watch “Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey.”
This isn’t some moral equivocation about the gory take on this beloved children’s icon, by the way.
The movie is just abjectly awful. Nobody asked for a slasher version of Winnie the Pooh stalking scantily clad women.
And it’s as poorly made, poorly edited, poorly acted and poorly received — outside of a brief window of virality when it was first revealed — as you’ve likely heard.
(That hasn’t stopped a sequel from getting greenlit, though that’s more a matter of the creatively bankrupt state of Hollywood — a different rant for a different time.)
Again: Nobody should watch this dreck.
It’s not for people with functioning brains, people who care about their time, people who have fond memories of Winnie the Pooh, or people who actually appreciate well-made horror cinema.
And it is, without question, certainly not for kids.
So imagine the horrified outcry of students and parents alike when a group of fourth-graders in Miami was shown this filth.
According to WFOR-TV, a Miami K-12 charter school, The Academy of Innovative Education, is deservedly under fire after students were shown a portion of the horror film.
Michelle Diaz, a parent of fourth-grade twins at the school, said her children were distraught after they “were exposed 20 to 30 minutes” to the movie.
The upset mother further alleged that an unnamed math teacher showed children this movie against their will.
“He didn’t stop the movie, even though there were kids saying, ‘Hey, stop the movie, we don’t want to watch this,'” Diaz said.
This entire debacle begs a number of questions, including a rather obvious one asked by the movie’s director, Rhys Waterfield, when he was broached about these traumatized fourth-graders.
“It’s mad, isn’t it?” Waterfield said in an interview with Variety. “I think it’s crazy. Because when you watch the film there is no way you can mistake it for a child’s film. Literally in the first 10 minutes, crazy stuff’s happening. And [the characters] look scary.”
“They said it went on 20 to 30 minutes. I don’t know how it went on that long. I don’t know if the teacher put it on and just walked out and left them or if the kids tricked them or something.
“Hopefully we haven’t ruined these kids’ childhoods.”
Miami Teacher Showed ‘Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey’ to Fourth Grade Class: A ‘Mental Health Counselor’ Has Met With ‘Students Who Expressed Concern’ https://t.co/BOTlitb5tJ
— Variety (@Variety) October 16, 2023
Now, according to WFOR, Diaz said that the students selected the movie.
But as the director alluded to, it’s apparent very quickly that this is not a film meant for kids.
One possible (and bad) explanation for why this movie may have slipped under the radar is that it doesn’t adhere to any familiar rating. The film is not rated R or NC-17, but NR or “not rated.”
But that still doesn’t excuse the aggressive negligence of this math teacher.
And neither does that excuse Waterfield from making this degenerate take on a beloved character.
There are no real winners in this story.
Just losers and victims — and the fourth-graders certainly aren’t losers.
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