This month, two killer bear movies have released into theaters, Winnie the Pooh Blood and Honey and Cocaine Bear. One bear is on a killing spree due to its grand luck of finding duffle bags full of cocaine in the forest, and it will do anything to get its fix. The other bear is out for revenge. He used to feed on joy and happiness, but his joy left him in the woods alone and hungry, so now he needs some blood to supplement his honey. Sadly in this situation Cocaine Bear got all of the hype, where as Blood and Honey had a small grass roots social media campaign to try and fuel its box office hopes. Honestly, if they make both of these kinds of movies more, I would be happy!
Cocaine Bear starts with a drug dealer’s plane falling out of the sky, so in order to save his product, he is throwing duffle bags of coke out of the plane, before he jumps out, but when he jumps out, he bangs his head, and his parachute fails to deploy. Drugs dealers rush to the Blood Mountain wilderness to find these bags of drugs, so that they can make some serious cash. While this is happening, Dee Dee and Henry are skipping school, so that they can go paint a waterfall. When Sari, Dee Dee’s mom, finds out that Dee is skipping school, she goes to the ranger station and enlists the help of Ranger Liz and Peter to find her daughter. All the while, a bear is on the prowl, and he was first to find the stash, and it acts as a serious stimulant for the bear. The bear is not on a hunt, but if anyone comes in the way of her cocaine, she is not afraid to rip a few limbs off. Some of the victims were hikers in the wrong place at the wrong time, and others had it coming, but the bear wants what the bear wants.
Blood and Honey, is the story of a left behind Pooh, Piglet, and Eeyore. Christopher Robin grew up and left the hundred acre woods and his friends. When he comes back to visit years later as an adult, Pooh and Piglet capture Christopher and kill his significant other. Next a group of girls come and stay in a cabin near the hundred acre woods, and Pooh’s thirst for blood continues, and so Pooh and Piglet, who is now a massive man boar, start to pick off the girls one by one, until one is left, and she teams up with captured Christopher Robin to try and kill Pooh and Piglet. (It is important to note, that very early on, the audience is shown Eeyore’s tombstone, so that is why he is not participating in the carnage.)
The main question surrounding these films is are they good? The easy answer is no, but sometimes, that is not what it is all about. Sometimes the goal of the movie is just to have fun and relish in how bad it is. Blood and Honey did this better than Cocaine Bear. It was both intentionally and unintentionally funny, and the crowd helped with the laughter too. Cocaine Bear had a lot going on, and it had some laughs, but there was so much other stuff going on that felt unnecessary, that it took away from the film. The best moment by far was when the bear snorted a line of cocaine off of a severed leg, that is pure cinema!
Both movies looked pretty bad too. The cocaine bear was complete CGI, and it was poorly done, but that made it feel like a Sharknado movie, or any of the other monster films that Sci-Fi shows on monster week, because they are so bad. So I feel like this works as a pro and a con. Blood and Honey however went in the total opposite direction. They had people in a Pooh and Piglet costume. The costumes were weird like hard plaster looking masks, and the mouths did not move, so when pooh was shoveling blood and honey into his mouth, it was a messy sloppy mess. The bear and hog mask were creepy. The best moment of this film came during broad day light. One of the girls was walking in the woods, and she turned her head, and Pooh was standing there, and then she turns to run away, and Pooh starts sprinting after her. It was both a hilarious visual, but also if you were in her shoes, and saw this creepy Pooh staring at you in the middle of the woods, that would be so terrifying. The worst part of Pooh was some of the blood was super fake. It was like CGI of a red water fountain, but this was not every time.
It was very similar to The Mean One, the horror remake of the Grinch. In The Mean One, all of the blood was like a fake red water fountain, and it really took away from the movie, it would have been better if they just squirted ketchup. The story line of Blood and Honey and The Mean One are also almost exactly the same. There is a kid who grew up, and now the monster wants revenge. The monsters have been hiding in places in nature, and they have slowly been taken more and more victims.
The acting ensemble of Cocaine Bear was actually really good. They had Ray Liotta, Kerri Russel, and Jesse Tyler Ferguson, and others, but despite their high acting chops, they could not save the lack of story. The premise for the movie, is great, but it is hard to really craft a story about a small premise. A cocaine bear can only eat so many people, and the sad part was that the bear was not even actually eating them, he was just killing for sport.
Another interesting choice for this movie was the kids doing cocaine. Two kids find a bag of cocaine, and they each taste it, and they take sizable bites, I know this is not a kids movie, but it still seems like a questionable choice to have two elementary schoolers try cocaine in a movie. Also the cocaine bear has two cubs, and when they get back to the den, the two cubs were covered in cocaine, and they kept going back to the bag for more. To top it off, Ray Liotta’s last scene in a movie, is him kicking and hitting innocent bear cubs, before he plummets to his death.
Also Hollywood continues to take some serious liberties with “based on a true story”. Yes, there were bags of cocaine dropped into the forest, and yes a bear did ingest 70 pounds of cocaine, but it died very shortly after, and there was not a bloody rampage, and sadly a bear did not snort a line off of a dismembered leg. On top of that, they placed the movie at Blood Mountain in the Chattahoochee Wilderness, which I initially thought was cool, because I have spent so much time out there hiking, but they were not in any place that looked like Blood Mountain to me, and they made up a fake waterfall, so at that point why not make up a fake mountain name as well, so then people like me will not be sitting there and being taken out of it for no reason. Apparently the movie was not even filmed in the U.S.
So both of these movies were fine, and Blood and Honey was the more fun of the two, it was more ridiculous, and its level of bad made it more fun, especially with its lack of a massive CGI bear to take away from it. If you are going to watch either movie, I definitely recommend seeing them in a crowd, the group laughter makes it so much better. These are both quick 90 minute movies. I gave them both 2.5 Stars.
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