Rhys Frake-Waterfield turns familiar children's characters into killers. His debut has a little effective gore, but thin characters and sluggish editing leave almost no suspense. We cannot recommend it on the strength of the idea alone.
Fi1m perspective
A familiar animal face becomes briefly unpleasant when it is worn by a killer. The masks in Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey (2023) manage that much, and Frake-Waterfield gets a little shock from the gore. His preference for practical creature designs gives him something physical to put before the camera. He plays the idea straight, which is a defensible choice: a horror film about a childhood companion turned dangerous need not keep winking. The trouble is how little he finds to do once we have registered the face.
This was his feature directing debut, made after the original book entered the public domain. The subsequent work has expanded around that opportunity: Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey 2 (2024) added characters and a film-within-a-film framing device. The wider Twisted Childhood Universe extends the approach to Peter Pan, Bambi and Pinocchio. Frake-Waterfield has found a premise that can accommodate plenty of familiar names, though our objection to the first film was never a shortage of creatures.
He also wrote the debut, and its problems begin with the characters. There is a workable horror story in the fear of abandonment, but he mostly settles for putting familiar animal faces on killers. The women caught up in the attacks are thinly drawn. We were bored, then irritated, because he spent so much longer hurting them than giving us reasons to care about them. The occasional effective piece of gore cannot compensate for that neglect.
Frake-Waterfield shares the editing credit with Scott Chambers, and their cutting lets repeated attacks drag without enough changes of pace or expectation. An 84-minute slasher should not feel this protracted. Andrew Scott Bell's music cannot supply the missing suspense when there is so little to anticipate between bouts of violence. These are problems with how scenes are written and assembled, and adding more creatures does not address them. Before he adds another childhood favourite, we would like him to give us someone to fear for.
Biography
Rhys Frake-Waterfield is a British filmmaker who works as a director, writer, producer and editor. He is best known for Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey (2023), on which he served as director, writer, editor and producer. The low-budget independent horror film was the first theatrical release for both Frake-Waterfield and his company Jagged Edge Productions, which he co-founded with Scott Jeffrey.
Frake-Waterfield is from Essex and graduated from the University of Essex with a first-class degree in economics. He left a corporate role at EDF Energy in 2021 to enter the film industry. He has since produced and directed numerous low-budget horror features, many drawing on public-domain properties, and launched the Twisted Childhood Universe with the Winnie-the-Pooh film and its 2024 sequel.
