Spoiler-Free Review Of 'The Mouse Trap'
Image source: YouTube
The expiration of copyright can be a good thing. It allows new creators to put a fun or interesting spin on certain creations that the original source material might not have considered or have been limited by. Disney itself only became successful thanks to the fact that characters like Snow White were in the public domain. It can allow for wonderful creativity.
But, like with pretty much everything, you have to take the good with the bad. Few instances have made this clearer than the 2023 slasher film Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey. Created because the copyright of the copyright for the character created by author A.A. Milne expired, Blood and Honey is already rightfully considered one of the worst films of all time, regardless of genre. It turns out that it was just the first in a long line of characters getting the horror treatment. It’s happened before, but it’s not been its own genre until now. While we have several other doubtless masterpieces in line from the directors of Blood and Honey, including a third film in that franchise, characters like Sleeping Beauty, Pinocchio, and Peter Pan getting the slasher treatment, they’re hardly the only people getting in on the oh so wonderful killer kids’ characters train.
RELATED:
Image Source: FutureoftheForce
With the Steamboat Willie version of Micky Mouse expiring in 2024, that left the door open for him to get his own slasher treatment. Enter the Canadian “horror comedy” film The Mouse Trap. I put the horror comedy bit in quotation marks because the film is neither. This film is bafflingly bad. It follows a group of dumb teenagers stuck in an arcade when a killer with a Steamboat Willie mask picks them off one by one.
The film tries to lean into its absurd premise with no success. It certainly thinks that it’s funnier than it is. It starts with a Star Wars-style opening text crawl that states that the film is in no way affiliated with Disney. It goes on for a full minute and a half in an eighty-minute movie. A big focus is a framing segment (think of the grandfather/grandson scenes in The Princess Bride for reference) that is not only poorly acted and has tons of plot holes but is only there to pad the runtime.
Image Source: YouTube
The story is bare bones. Beyond the typical slasher setup of “young people trapped in a building with a masked killer”, there’s nothing new they even try to do with it. Every story beat is as predictable as possible. The acting? Comparing it to middle school plays would be an insult to middle school plays. I get the feeling that these were all people who were excited to work on this, but there is nothing resembling a great performance. The worst comes from the detectives in the wraparound segments, but none of them are all that great.
The worst part, though? None of the kills are any fun at all. At least Blood and Honey had some halfway-decent kills. Here, we don’t even have that. Even in the worst slasher films, we have one or two that are halfway interesting, but in this film? None of that. It’s depressing.
The film has an eighty-minute runtime, and you feel every one. I didn’t pay to watch this movie, and I still feel like I want my money back. There are no scares, no good kills, every “joke” falls flatter than a penny on the railroad tracks, and it was just made to cash in on the “make a childhood character a killer” craze. Is it even worse than Blood and Honey? Without a doubt.
Rating: 0/10
READ NEXT:
Latest News
Featured
