The Mouse Trap (2024) [REVIEW] | Unhappy Mappy

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.

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The Mysterious Island AKA Odysseus And The Giant Polyphemus (1905) [REVIEW] | Odeon Days

You know me, i’m not one to go try and please the algorhythm, and since there’s no really much in terms of full lenght features trying to adapt the whole Odyssey itself (there is a recent UK production called Itaka: The Return, but even that is mostly focused on the titular return of Odysseus at his home in Itaka after decades, and not much else)…… you know what, we’re going REALLY back this time around.

Not to the 70s miniseries for TV, back to the 1900s, when cinema was in its “puppet stage”… actually, more aptly it’s “parlor trick era”, since today we’re talking about one of the many films (by now not even registering as short films, or shorts) by the profilic primordial magician of cinema, Georges Meliès, which i feel needs no introduction, otherwise this will turn into an introduction to the early days of cinema, but basically, he was a magician in the literal sense, a stage magician but using film as his tool, and to which we owe a LOT of early cinematic special effects, which now look primitive, but sure as hell weren’t when people weren’t used to video footage of any kind.

For the time it must have felt like real magic, to say the least.

Even more impressive, Melies had been doing these films for a decade, so in a way it’s not too surprising this 1905 adaptation isn’t more remembered than his Voyage To The Moon or The Impossible Voyage, despite not being lost or anything like that, quite the opposite, since – as far as i know – this always appeared in the catalogues of production by Melies’ company, Star Films.

Sure as hell it doesn’t help that its original title was L’ilè De Calypso, literally “Calypso’s Island”, even less when it was sold internationally as The Mysterious Island, or given the subtitle of “Ulysse et le geant Polypheme”, Ulysses And The Giant Polyphemus.

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Shiver Me Timbers (2025) [REVIEW] | Night Of The Sailor Comet

As the time of writing (and posting, since i improvised this trifecta of Popeye horror films’ reviews) this is the more recent in the batch of 3 horror films based around Popeye’s copyright falling into the public domain that were basically dumped on VOD, all released in a matter of months (or weeks) from one another, and while i’m fairly sure there by September (to be very generous) this specific declination of the fad will have died down due to diminishing returns (since it’s the third time, after Winnie The Pooh and Steamboat Willy’s Mickey Mouse) … i’m not putting this mini-marathon of modern “public domainxploitaition” in “extend mode” if another one or more of these eventually crop up, i’m not playing catch-up anymore.

So let’s see how Shiver Me Timbers, the debut film for director-writer Paul Stephen-Mann, fares out.

In the summer of 1986, a group of friends, led by Olive Oil and her brother Castor, are going on a trip in Northern California to witness the rare Haley’s comet meteor shower event, but they couldn’t expect that a comet piece would fall to the ground that night, a piece lodging itself into the corncob pipe of a reclusive fisherman living nearby, Popeye, now turned into a monstrous, violent killer with superhuman strenght, ready to sate its bloodthirst on Olive and his friends..

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Popeye’s Revenge (2025) [REVIEW] | Hamburger Friday The 13th

Surprise!

As i said prefacing the review for Popeye The Slayer Man, i’m not gonna change the schedule for these films, but since i also don’t want to have these hanging off the “to do” list like dingleberries, we’re doing overtime.. well, I am doing overtime, let’s cover these now and hope i won’t have to do another round of Popeye-xploitation in the fall.

And yes, i guess i should have done this before Popeye The Slayer Man, since it came out earlier and it’s actually the first one to capitalize on Popeye’s character falling into public domain (the other free idea bucket alongside mythology), and surprising no one it’s by one of the production companies behind the Winnie Pooh Blood And Honey movies (though it’s not part of their Twisted Childhood Universe), heck, it’s written by Harry Boxley (Dinosaur Hotel 3, Jurassic Triangle, Tsunami Sharks, and of course a couple of the Steamboat Willy-xploitation flicks, Mouseboat Massacre and Mouse Of Horrors), and directed by William Stead, curiously not his feature lenght debut, as directed something called “Children Of The Night” back in 2023.

The plot is that in a UK coastal town, a boy with abnormal arms and a pronounced chin is born, his appereance leading to him getting relentelessly getting bullied at school (where he often dons his sailor outfit), until one day he snaps and fights back, killing one of his bullies.

His parents hide him in the basement for his own good, but the townspeople form an angry mob and they torch down Popeye’s family home, with his parents dying in the fire and apparently him drowning in a nearby lake.

Years later some douchy young adults inherit the house, unaware of his dark history, but as they try to settle in more and more of them keep disappearing off…

You know what this sounds like?

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Winnie The Pooh: Blood And Honey (2023) [REVIEW] | Public Domain Expansion

I knew of this one, and that i eventually will have to feature it here, and i guess the moment arrived for me to actually see the damn thing when they – almost to my surprise – localized it for Halloween 2023, and put it as an Amazon Prime Video streaming exclusive.

Which does remind one of the state of the service itself, but whatever, it’s basically free, not beholden to another paid subscription within Prime Video, they bothered to even dub it, let’s not post-pone the inevitable any further.

“Inevitable” since this movie’s only reason for existing is the original Winnie The Pooh’s book falling into public domain in the US in January 2022.

So let’s be honest, sooner or later someone was simply gonna do this movie, i mean, the public domain slide is why we have so many unrelated Amytiville movies, for example.

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