I swore this off when it came out, even more since i did end up covering all the 3 fucking Popeye slashers that came out last year, but we’re getting at least one more of those, and apparently more of “Steamboat Willie as a horror movie” as a sequel for this was greenlit very soon (one month) after this one dropped in August 2024.
Plus this showed up today on my Amazon Prime Video feed, and since i’ve basically done the same with the Winnie The Pooh horror films, i guess it was indeed inevitable, so consider it a bonus review to excuse the Global Defence Force Tactics retrospective piece getting bumped to August.
I’ve already said a lot of what i thought about these kind of productions in my reviews of both the aforementioned Winnie The Pooh Blood And Honey films and the various Popeye slashers, but in case you weren’t aware, this is actually “patient zero” for this new trend among the bottom feeders of the indie horror scene, as in, waiting for a specific work’s copyright to expire and as soon as possible jump on its new public domain status to do a quickie cashgrab in the form of a cheap low budget slasher flick; the virus might mutate but so far this is the route chosen, as it’s easy, obvious and so brazenly shameless it will put eyes on your piece of shit.
More specifically, this exists because the famous Disney short featuring Mickey Mouse, Steamboat Willie, fell into the public domain on January 1, 2024, just that, meaning THAT Mickey Mouse’s appearance was “fair game”, not the other interpretations/designs/incarnations that followed, as Disney owns the copyright to those.
And Canadian filmmakers Jamie Bailey and Simon Philipps were eager to cash that “mouse money”, as they announced the film (as Mickey Mouse’s Trap, as if they ever expected that title to actually pass legit) on the very same day Steamboat Willie’s became public domain material.
More unbelievable was that this was supposed to get a theathrical release… it didn’t.
Whatever, what is actually The Mouse Trap about?
But about an amusement arcade massacre that happened the night before, with the police interrogating the sole survivor, a girl named Rebecca, whom fears they will all die if she talks… but since the movie would end there if she didn’t, she recounts the events of that night, which involve a killer in a Mickey Mouse mask killing a group of friends, reunited to spring a surprise birthday party to Alex, who works there.
Yeah, that sound about right… as in generic, what you’d expect, the bare mininum, at best.
The follow up question…. yes, it does manage to make even the first Winnie The Pooh Blood and Honey like a competent piece of work, and i hate having to sorta praise that fuckin film.
Also, yes, i know its a fool’s errand to even bother criticizing the details… or so i would say, but it’s a testament to how these public domain horror manage to set an already low bar closer to Lucifers’ icy prison in Hell, as the killer is stunned-sensible to flashing lights, while doing a killing spree in a fuckin arcade.
The first and only (so far, anyway) slasher villain defeated by an overly bright Neo Geo arcade cabinet start-up sequence shining in the darkness, a foe so perilous it’s immediatly bested by an active light shower of a ufo catcher/claw machine, downed by the neon glow of a coin pusher, annihilated bythe flashing a giant Space Invaders screen-cabinet.
He would have outright exploded if this took place in Akihabara.
There’s no pussyfooting around how stupid this is, and i was gonna argue why plan your massacre in a place as such… but then again, i don’t think there was planning involved, and i’m not even just talking about the killer, it’s obvious they made up the script along the way because the masked killer also gets the ability to teleport, as in, it’s not the usual stylization of the way the slasher villain moves around, here it literally has the ability to teleport around, canonically so, they wrote this in the script, which is somehow even lazier than not acknowledging it.
So one wonders why bother with that and not anything else, like giving a reason to why the arcade owner goes full Green Goblin with the Mickey Mouse mask, why it eventually gives him the teleportation powers, as we’re left assuming since it could have been the Steamboat Willie reel to house a spirit, since they don’t even go with the Splatterhouse route of the mask being sentient and using the human. They never go… anywhere with any of this, at all, to think of it, completely wasting its own gimmick of using Steamboat Willie as a base.
Heck, at least Popeye The Slayer Man took place in a portual town and nautical adjacent locations, here you really could replace the killer mask with anything else and nothing would change, they don’t even bother to have the killer imitate Mickey’s speaking voice or anything.
I’d rant more about that but frankly that’s not even the worst part, as is horribly directed to boot, as said before it’s all framed as one of the survivors, Rebecca, being interrogated by two detectives about what happened that night, and this choice alone already kills any potential suspence, as we know at least Rebecca survived, BUT it also destroys any pacing, as get the lousy mouse detectives interrupting Rebecca to ask mostly stupid shit, making the narrative constantly interrupting itself.
You’d think this is building up to a twist of some kind, a final revelation that changes everything…. but in an evil galaxy brain move, the movie has no actual ending to complain about, there’s no finale, the plot just stops, Rebecca remains in jail, the detectives don’t believe her story, we just learn that the killer broke out of the trap, teleported back to decapitate Alex, and then fucked off, with even the dumb jock, Ryan, being cut off complaing of the absolute shit cop-out this is.
An anticlimactic non-finale, it’s kinda amazing if it wasn’t pure laziness, that leads to a stupid, very stupid, plot that is both thin and overly convoluted, with holes big as house, a joke of a film that even lacks a punchline, just in case the audience didn’t suffer enough, fuck em, right?
Throw in a post-credit scene that sets up a sequel and doesn’t actually explain shit, that will do.
Nothing makes sense, nothing is ever explained, and “nothing” about sums up the levels of gore and violence, barely any blood, most kills are either done offscreen or incredibly banal, so it doesn’t work even if approached purely from that angle, acting is obvious amateur hour and everyone gives off the vibe of “turns out i really didn’t want to do this”, not helped by the shit tier dialogues.
It’s not even fun bad, this is just pointless, meandering, boring, just an absolute waste of time of a film, even at jusy 81 minutes it’s overly long and overly padded, the best part is seeing the bits of the Steamboat Willie cartoon play in the opening credits… that and pausing to see what arcade machines they have in the place, as the movie does work as the worse possible unintentional ad for PacMan Battle Royale or Asphalt 9.
I’d also complain about the killer identity (you know, just for a good kicking) but the movie doesn’t really makes any mystery about that, we know it’s the “maybe Green Goblined” owner of the arcade place, we’re not given any reason or chance to doubt that…and in case you forgot, in one scene (the drunk girl playin a VR Infinity Blade thing) we see the actor’s beard stick out of the mask’s mouth hole, and yes, its the only character that has been shown with a beard.
That really says it all in terms of production values, but yes, its cheap, even Pooh mask in Blood And Honey looked better, and even that movie somehow was shot more competently than this, again, i hate praising that film but The Mouse Trap manages to be notably even worse than that.
I will grant the movie leniency in deciding not to put Mickey Mouse’s name in the final title, i get it wasn’t worth the legal headaches, but maybe stop trying to do overdone bits like the Star Wars text drop disclaimer of them not being associated with Disney that plays at the beginning, don’t do it at all, it goes on too long, it’s not really funny, and its frankly indicative of how spineless you are.
You wanna make cheap exploitation horror films, fine, but don’t pretend you’re above that by doing the self-awareness thing, commit to it, instead of doing fake “funny” excuses, own it, don’t make these pretend apologies, you make Roger Corman turn around in his grave.
Kids these days didn’t learn anything from the old Italian shlockmaisters that would make unofficial sequels to Tinto Brass’s Caligula and then put “we used the sets and costumes WITHOUT the consent of the original costume and set designer”.
Also, with a shit script like this, you really shouldn’t make metacommentary about subplots “being off a shitty 90s horror movie” when most of those 90 slasher would wipe the floor with your spineless cash grab that exists to exploit legal loopholes and concessions, and doesn’t even know what to even do with itself, as it just stops instead of ending, as either they didn’t have time or money left or couldn’t be arsed to come up with an actual ending.
Those who have a 2.4 (out of 10) rating on IMDB (which is still slightly generous in my opinion) shouldn’t cast stones, to put it another way.
Even if free on Amazon Prime Video with a basic subscription, i struggle to even recommend as a curiosity to slasher buff The Mouse Trap, as it’s such a pointless waste of time that you will want back, a case study for one of the more pointless slashers ever put to film, even fully knowing its an obvious cash grab that immediatly jumped on the occasion of Steamboat Willie falling into the public domain to make some very low budget slasher crap.
See you for the review of the sequel i mentioned at the beginning, The Mouse Trap: Into The Mickeyverse, i guess, definitely it would be near impossible to do even worse, but ideally we’ll never know and i will forget about this promise and these movie entirely.
Wise Cafe (International) 