Based on the late-1960s manga by Kazuo Umezu, Cat Eyed Boy is about a cat-eyed boy. (Let’s just call him “CEB” to make things easy and not spend all our hyphens in one review.) Resembling what I’d imagine the McDonald’s Hamburglar to spawn — but with short pants, tube socks and cleft lip — he lives in the rafters of an empty home in a village outside Tokyo.

As the shot-on-video movie opens, a family moves in and CEB slowly reveals his presence to the brother and sister. The precocious brother is cured of his asthma when CEB power-hocks a loogie straight from his sinuses into the back of the kid’s throat. The teenage sister’s hair-hidden, half-face birthmark peels off when CEB licks it with vigor and without consent. Lest you think this is all about his magic saliva, you’re wrong; CEB also urinates on the boy’s bullies.

Director Noboro Iguchi, he of such Japanese nonsense as Mutant Girls Squad and Zombie Ass: Toilet of the Dead, works in a story — kinda sorta — with the village terrorized by a trench-coated, bandage-wrapped Darkman-looking motherfucker and a bumpy meatball monster that’s a dead ringer for a type 2 on the Bristol stool scale.

Luckily, CEB’s spit bores holes … so I guess the movie is all about his magic saliva. Expectorate or no, Cat Eyed Boy is a missed opportunity. Umezu’s original stories — including “The Meatball Monster,” which this adapts — are a blast of gateway horror; what they aren’t, weirdo premise and all, is goofy comedy dependent on gross-out humor. That makes Iguchi the wrong type to faithfully bring CEB to the screen. Other than replicating the main character’s design, this translation doesn’t work. If it were on film, it might better sell the facade. However, the utter flatness and cheapness of video only heightens the fakery, making the entire thing look like a joke.

As of this typing, Cat Eyed Boy has no legitimate American release, but you can watch it on YouTube below. While no English subtitles exist, they’re not what you’d call necessary. —Rod Lott

Contrary to popular belief, the worst type of movie isn’t a bad one; it’s a bad one that’s not any fun.

Enter Rhys Frake-Waterfield, one of the “talents” behind Spider in the Attic, Firenado, Dinosaur Hotel and other extremely lazy assembly-line flicks, many of which seem to take place on the same piece of property in rural England. The man deserves credit for seizing the day: Jan. 1, 2022, to be exact, when A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh legally entered the public domain, meaning now anyone can make a Pooh film (or TV show or book, etc.), free of fear of copyright infringement. Frake-Waterfield’s literal million-dollar idea was to turn the silly old bear from kiddie icon to serial killer.

Unfortunately, the imagination stopped there. The piss-poor outcome, Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey, appears to be written and directed by someone who has never seen a feature film. While that’s clearly not the case, Frake-Waterfield struggles (although that implies effort) with the concepts of pacing, plot, frame composition and other elements of storytelling, visual or otherwise. Its poster boasts the tagline, “This ain’t no bedtime story,” because it hasn’t a story at all. Jason Voorhees and Michael Myers are the stuff of Charles Dickens next to this.

A hastily animated prologue in charcoal sketch posits the idea of Pooh, Piglet and friends becoming crazed once young Christopher Robin leaves the 100 Acre Wood for university. Suddenly short of food, they even eat Eeyore.

The second prologue finds Christopher (Nikolai Leon of Frake-Waterfield’s The Killing Tree) returning to introduce his fiancée (Paula Coiz, Tooth Fairy: Queen of Pain) to his animal buddies. Despite many minutes of her sensing danger and pleading they GTFO, they don’t, so he gets to watch her be slaughtered by Pooh (Craig David Dowsett of Frake-Waterfield’s The Area 51 Incident) and Piglet (Chris Cordell, Werewolf Cabal) — now hulking man-creatures in rubber masks because just go with it, I guess.

Prologues now over, we meet Maria (Maria Taylor of the Frake-Waterfield-produced Mega Lightning) and her four friends, none of whose names I caught, not that you need. They’re girl-tripping at a rented cottage, so they, too, can help reduce the world’s population in less than 90 minutes. The most vapid (UK model Natasha Tosini) is yanked from a hot tub to be squished under a Pooh-driven car. Gore looks like cartoon strawberry jelly, because the entire movie is underlit.

Between its kills are enough padding to generously stuff the fluff of the pillows of every orphanage, hospital and hostel within a 100-mile range. I get the curiosity factor; I, too, succumbed. But I implore you: Stick with the trailer. Life’s too short. So short I’ll tell you how the movie ends: Pooh repeatedly stabs Maria in the head; fade to credits; everyone is the audience is agog, like, “What? That’s the finish? Is a scene missing?”

One would expect the thing to keep going to an actual denouement. Instead, Frake-Waterfield will keep going, returning to the honeypot with Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey 2, Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare, Bambi: The Reckoning and assuredly several more until the ROI is DOA. It’s not unlike the brief flurry of classic literature/modern horror mash-ups that followed Seth Grahame-Smith’s 2009 viral-smash novel Pride and Prejudice and Zombies until the craze ran itself dry, except the film adaptation is watchable.

Look, when you cover genre film for as long as I have (three decades plus, professionally), you often end up “taking one for the team.” However, Blood and Honey is a different sort of beast. Upon buying two tickets at the AMC Theatres kiosk and seeing the total exceed $30, it’s the only time I started to question my life’s choices. Oh, bother. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon, if you absolutely have to.