The Mouse Trap (2024) – ARRRRRRRRRRRRRGH

Released: 31st October
Seen: 28th December

This year, the leader of the club that’s made for you and me entered into the public domain. That’s right, Mickey Mouse is now officially available for use by anyone for any reason that they want as long as they only use things associated with the version of Mickey Mouse that can be found in the Steamboat Willie short (or in the two other shorts that came out that year, but the version you know is the Steamboat Willie version). This is a huge deal in terms of copyright laws, the reason that the public domain has been so empty for so many years can pretty much be explained by the reality that Disney never wanted Mickey to be in the public domain so they fought hard to keep him out of it but eventually, it had to happen, Mickey can now be put into any film or video game that you would dare to put him. As is tradition when big things like this enter the public domain, someone has to take it and turn it into a horror film as a symbolic gesture to show that no one owns this toy anymore, no one can stop you… someone should’ve stopped this, what the fuck did I just sit through?

The Mouse Trap takes place in a stupid fucking arcade after hours where a bunch of whiny snivelling 20-somethings are having a party and then a guy in a two-buck Mickey mask turns up, teleports around for some fucking reason and then stabs a few people with a knife. This is occasionally intercut with footage of one of the surviving victims telling the police what happened because this film desperately needed padding to make it to 80 minutes because heaven forbid this film doesn’t have enough content to legally count as a feature film. Do the characters survive? Do they get along? Do they have names? I do not give a fuck, nothing about this film deserves a fuck that one could give, the only reason it’s getting written about is that I stupidly watched it and if I do not vent about it I will actually explode.

So a few years ago we were treated to a little film called Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey and it was fucking awful, one of the worst films of that year by any metric. It was a disaster of a film that no one could really find much good to say about… and that film was a million times better than the slop that was just blasted into my eyeballs by a team of people who clearly just wanted to ride the wave of notoriety by being the first ones to do this. At least the Winnie the Pooh guys tried to make sure their horror film used the source material, at least they paid lip service on some level by placing the horror near the hundred-acre wood or having the little cartoons that looked like they were from the original books. The Mouse Trap could’ve been about any guy in a mask and been the exact same movie, which is its first big problem. It never uses the actual material it has access to beyond just putting the killer in a Mickey Mouse mask (and a hockey jersey, a costume Mickey is totes famous for wearing in the Steamboat Willie short) and occasionally showing the cartoon in two early scenes before going ‘fuck it’ and moving on.

The Mouse Trap has to move on because despite how simple the plot should be (Mickey kills a bunch of teenagers… the end, that’s all this film fucking needed to be) they complicate things with a bunch of superfluous nonsense. Turns out that the killer isn’t Mickey but is actually just the guy who runs the arcade that we suffer through the film in who is apparently a Mickey obsessive (he has a fucking shrine with the mask in it, the man probably jerks off to Mickey erotica) who gets put in some kind of trance while watching the Steamboat Willie short on a projector then gains teleportation powers to start doing murder. No one is expecting the killer explanation to be great but that is some convoluted nonsense. Hell, EVERYTHING about the Mickey killer is complicated in a dull way. He’s a magical possessed being who can teleport but he’s weak against strobe lights (fuck off) but he also can only kill because he happened to find a cake knife around and also has to use simple bike locks to lock the place up… notice how none of this is fun or funny to explain? Notice how it’s all just overly pathetic and not imaginative at all? That’s the entire film.

Perhaps the worst part of The Mouse Trap is the random cutaways to a police station where our ‘lone survivor’ (aka the actress who was probably available to do the shoot that day when they realised they barely had 60 minutes of usable footage to make a movie) recounts the entire story of the film… except there’s a solid chunk of the film where she is either supposedly dead or just not in the room and so they lampshade it by having the cops pointedly say “you were not there, how do you know this” and end up giving some stupid explanation. It’s so clearly done to pad the running time that they had to very obviously cut this actress’s death scene short so it could be believable that she’s still alive. This entire set of sequences offers nothing, it’s so clearly just padding for the sake of padding and every time it comes back on screen it kills any momentum the film might have had if this film were capable of doing something that resembled gaining momentum. It’s an insult to the audience’s intelligence, an insult to decent filmmaking, just generally I feel insulted by this decision which is why I have no problems saying this film is a pus-filled pustule growing on the anal gland of cinema. It did the insulting first with this nonsensical crap. 

Throughout The Mouse Trap, the film keeps trying to convince you that the characters are interesting or memorable or deserve to live in any way but they aren’t, these characters are bland even by Slasher movie standards. Even the cheapest shittiest slasher movie from the heyday of Slashers had one half-interesting or memorable cast member who made you enjoy them. You could be the third person killed in the worst Friday the 13th movie and still be well-known enough to get invited to a horror convention but no one in this film is worth remembering. It almost feels cruel to credit the actors by name because they have to try and have careers after this. Maybe one of them gives something resembling a halfway interesting performance and that’s because she’s playing the bitch character who gets the 3 half funny lines in the entire film, and that’s me being GENEROUS but I do not feel like being generous with this film.

The real thing that kicked me from disliking to unadulterated loathing for this film was the use of strobe lights as the main weapon against the killer Mickey. It makes no damn sense, why does an arcade just have handheld strobe lights that everyone can just use (seems like a big old health hazard for every possible reason) and why the hell is this mouse weakened by strobes? They could’ve done something interesting by maybe suggesting it was that the strobes were like the projector of a film and that drained his powers but that would be smart and this film refuses to do anything smart on principle so I think it’s just because the filmmakers hate epileptics and want them to suffer, that’s the best option I can come up with that isn’t just outright incompetence and tupidity. It’s a bad decision made for no reason that eventually leads to the least satisfying climax in horror movie history. Seriously, if I didn’t have a policy about not outright spoiling the ending I would describe what happens but you would think I was lying because it’s so abrupt and stupid so trust me, it’s the worst ending ever. It would’ve been more satisfying if my TV caught fire in the final act and burned my house down, at least that would’ve made me feel something!

The Mouse Trap is absolute garbage from top to bottom without a single redeeming feature in it. It’s not a funny little parody like the Star Wars opening text crawl suggests (Oh right, this thing opens with a Star Wars text crawl… cos that’s relevant and also in the public domain, right?!), it’s a shitty cash grab that was made to jump in and claim the throne as the first person to make a Mickey horror film. Well congrats movie, you’re the first… and like all first monarchs, can’t wait to see you lose your head. There is not a single thing that could be praised about this film, the closest it’s getting to praise is it shows us all what the worst of this kind of film can look like… now we just have to hope the upcoming Screamboat film isn’t as awful (cos of course there’s more of these, we’re getting so much killer Mickey in the next few years it’ll blow your fucking mind)