The Mouse Trap (2024)

"This is not the funhouse"

Plot

It’s Alex’s twenty-first birthday but she’s stuck at the amusement arcade on a late shift after someone hires the venue out. It turns out that her friends have surprised her and booked the arcade for her party. But a masked killer dressed as Mickey Mouse decides to play a game of his own with them which they must survive.

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The recent trend of turning lapsed copyright characters into horror icons shows no slowing down. On January 1st 2024, Mickey Mouse's Steamboat Willie went into the public domain as the ninety-five year intellectual property rights (also known as copyright) expired. Disney still retained exclusive rights to their later depictions of Mickey Mouse, arguably the version we're all familiar with from the cartoons, but the original Steamboat version was now fair game. So just as the case was with Winnie the Pooh a few years ago, this meant it was open season for anyone wanting to use the character in their own work and there wasn't a thing Disney could do to stop them. As the copyright expiry was widely known, you had people designing and developing everything in secret so that as soon as January 1st hit, projects were quickly announced. The Mouse Trap was the first one to have its trailer release and was quick out of the blocks to try and cash-in before others go there first - the first horror film starring Mickey Mouse and forever to ruin childhoods.

The Mouse Trap was set for a worldwide theatrical release in March 2024 but suffered delays. Aside from the novelty value of a killer Mickey Mouse, there is no way in Hell that this would ever deserve a cinematic release. It's a shameless production, a truly ghastly exploitation exercise in stripping clean the bones of a once protected property for pure shits and giggles. It's billed as a horror comedy, with a really silly Star Wars-style scrolling credits sequence which tonally fails to match up with any of the other attempts at humour on show throughout. It also show some clips of Steamboat Willie just because it can; almost a raised middle finger to copyright law and to Disney's failure to do anything about it. It's very clear who the killer is but the film never once refers to him as Mickey Mouse, probably to avoid any loopholes in the copyright in case they veered a little too close to the Disney version.

The Mouse Trap's worst decision comes right off the bat with a daft framing device of having a survivor being interviewed by police in a cell. So everything that we now witness has already happened and is being recounted, meaning lots of back and forth cuts between the action and the interview. This gets so frustrating just when the film is trying to build some atmosphere or tension and then it swings back to the cops, ruining any flow the narrative was building up. It's obviously padding and the framing device doesn't have a purpose at all with no resolution to the police procedural. The film takes forever to get going too which is a crime in itself given the slender eighty-one minutes, though The Mouse Trap is not short enough in all honesty. You'd expect the film to really go all-in on its concept with gratuitous gore and needless violence, kind of like Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey did, in order to be as memorable as possible given that it's the first horror outing for Mickey. But the stalking sequences are dreadful and the kills are mostly bloodless and so generic, with Mickey using a knife for the most part rather than coming up with more inventive ways to dispatch his victims. This could be any lame slasher in a mask and the film completely wastes the potential and uniqueness of its situation.

The characters are written to be self-aware, referencing not going off to explore on your own, who/why someone is the killer, or whether they'd survive in a Nineties slasher. Did the script forget this was supposed to be a horror comedy? Self-awareness ceased to be funny decades ago, especially when it's written as badly as this. But The Mouse Trap's plot is like a Swiss cheese of holes. No explanation is given for how Mickey comes to life (some nonsense about the arcade owner becoming possessed but never answering why), how he has teleportation powers, how he hates strobe lights (though one can guess it's due to the rapid flashing of the projectors used to show Steamboat Willie in the olden days), why he's chosen this particular group of characters to kill after so many years....I could go on and on with plot holes that I spotted which just ruin the film. At least give us some reasonable and plausible explanations for things, even if they are far-fetched - completely ignoring these big ideas with a shrug of the shoulders is such lazy filmmaking.

Photography took place over eight days in an actual arcade called Funhaven and I'm pretty sure they did it guerrilla-style because I swear during the scenes inside the Jungle Jim, you can see silhouettes of people playing in the arcade in the background. Perhaps this also explains the very sudden ending, with no real resolution taking place and whilst it mercifully ends the suffering for the audience, the fact it stops mid-scene suggests that not even the writers could figure out a way to end this properly given all of the plot inconsistencies they'd glossed over earlier. The Mouse Trap seems so content being the first one out of the blocks that the makers just couldn't care less about making the best thing they could as they knew people would be fascinated and intrigued enough by the concept that they wouldn't care.

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Final Verdict

To misquote Jeff Goldblum's Ian Malcolm from Jurassic Park, "You filmmakers were so preoccupied with whether or not you could, you didn't stop to think if you should." The Mouse Trap is a truly woeful production, a cash grab which was clearly rushed just to be the first Mickey Mouse horror film. Honestly one of the worst pieces of rubbish I've ever watched for this web site.

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The Mouse Trap Director(s): Jamie Bailey Writer(s): Simon Phillips Actor(s): Simon Phillips, Sophie McIntosh, Madeline Kelman, Ben Harris, Calum Sywyk, Mireille Gagné, James Laurin, Kayleigh Styles Duration: 81 mins