Piglet review
It’s exactly what you expect. Somehow worse.
New movie reviews will not contain spoilers.
Piglet
Directed by Andrea M. Catinella
Written by Harry Boxley
Starring Alexander Butler, Lauren Staerck, Alina Desmond, Shayli Reagan, Jeremy Vinogradov, Valery Danko and Eva Ray
Piglet Review
Anyone who has followed my journey to experience every low-budget public domain slasher movie being dumped upon society may be surprised to learn that, somehow, one was missed. Last week I started seeing trailers for Piglet popping up on YouTube. My initial feeling was, of course, one of excitement. I can’t get enough of these (usually) bad slasher movies. I’ve written about how they have essentially filled the gap that used to contain the really bad slashers of the 80s. I’m not talking about the bad Friday the 13th installments…I’m talking about the really bad, even cheaper, knockoffs that made up the childhood of anyone now in their 40s. It was with no small surprise that I learned Piglet had actually already been released back in…January? Though it seems impossible to have missed that…there it was. Available on VOD and streaming on Tubi. Unfortunately, Piglet was better left missed.
I say that while using the already preposterously set grading curve established by public domain slashers. For anyone who needs a quick refresh…a public domain slasher is a low-budget horror movie featuring a character from your childhood as its antagonist. We’ve reached a period where each year opens the door to new favorites reaching, you guessed it, the public domain. Which means anyone can use them. Everyone apparently wants to use them to make low-budget slasher movies. We’ve had five Mickey Mouse movies and three Popeye movies since they became public domain characters. And, of course, we’ve had the Winnie-the-Pooh series. That’s where things become needlessly complicated.
Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey started this wave of unimaginative releases. It was a bad movie…as almost all of these are. So bad, in fact, it was relegated to a film within a film when it’s sequel Blood and Honey 2 came out. Blood and Honey 2 was an improvement. So too was the next release in the now designated Poohniverse, Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare. The next piece of this faux-Avengers puzzle, Bambi: The Reckoning arrives in theaters this summer. This is all fairly straightforward. Where it gets messy is the releases from the SAME STUDIO that are unrelated to the Poohniverse…but use the same characters.
Back in January (when Piglet was apparently being dumped onto VOD without warning) I reviewed a Mickey Mouse slasher called Mouse of Horrors. A bad slasher with an odd piece of interest (to whom…I don’t know). Winnie-the-Pooh pops up in it. He’s not called that but it’s the same costume as the original Blood and Honey and it’s clearly intended to be. Mouse of Horrors was released by…the same studio making the Poohniverse. It begged the question…was Mouse of Horrors simply caught in the discarded rubble that the original Blood and Honey left in its wake? Or were they just reappropriating a costume and nothing matters anyway? Enter Piglet. Piglet is also unrelated to the Poohniverse. It is also released by the SAME STUDIO. And it also uses the same costume the character wore in Blood and Honey.
ITN Distribution has, somehow, created their own knockoffs to their rip-offs. A lower tier on their already low tier public domain slashers. Piglet repurposes the costume from Blood and Honey into an original story…stretching that phrase as far as humanly possible. This isn’t a movie about Winnie-the-Pooh’s friend. It’s about a serial killer wearing a Piglet mask. I know. I know.
The story revolves around a party and a lot of disposable characters…as most of these things do. Kate (Alina Desmond) is turning 21. Her sister and her friends gather at a remote cabin in the…you already know exactly where this is going. Familiarity isn’t the issue with Piglet or any other version of these movies. There is a place for the familiar. There is a place for the expected. That place has, in fact, traditionally been the slasher genre. It’s hard to dock points for unoriginality when you become convinced that it’s practically the point. The comfortability and “turn off your brain” aspects of low budget slashers are, for better or worse, their appeal.
But they’re also exhausting. I think of slasher movies like a box. The structure was finished a long time ago…and even the best variations do so within that structure. Scream doesn’t work if it doesn’t understand the box that it’s inside of. You can’t comment or innovate on rules without first understanding them. You can’t even break them until you put yourself inside of that box. But you have to do something. Piglet doesn’t. It almost, briefly, seems to accidentally stumble onto an interesting idea by presenting two potential final girl stories…but it doesn’t realize it was doing so and that goes nowhere.
What Piglet does do…is a lazy greatest hits package. Nude sex scene followed by imminent kill shot? You got it. Cell phones are not working in their remote location? Naturally. Secret bad guys related to the masked killer that make things more difficult? Ok…that one is just every Texas Chainsaw movie…but Piglet ends up taking the same road. Without the excellent characters and incredible set design. There’s even a shower kill…although one done to a character still wearing their bathing suit. Which is…kind of an innovation…I guess.
There’s something about a toxic serum that makes the masked killer unstoppable…and Kate has some past relationship trauma. None of that really matters. The most fun there is to be had in Piglet is tracking the wildly different accents the cast brings to the table. The truth is…sometimes people just make movies because they have a Piglet costume laying around.
Scare Value
Piglet is so unoriginal it’s repurposing someone else’s costume. If you go into the movie expecting that level of excitement…you’ll still walk away feeling like you wasted 82 minutes. Piglet sits at the bottom of the public domain slasher realm with Shiver Me Timbers. It’s probably, somehow, even less fun than that Popeye misfire. Though it isn’t quite as insulting to watch. So, there’s that.
1/5
Piglet Links
Streaming on Tubi
Rent/Buy on VOD from Amazon and Fandango at Home
