Stream It Or Skip It?

Re: The recent strain of Disney public domain blasphemies. If anyone does Donald Duck dirty, there will be hell to pay, and I’ll lead the charge. But Mickey Mouse? Meh. As the primary symbol of a corporate entity that’s both a source of great joy and great evil (two things can be true at once, as ever), he can take his lumps. Screamboat (now streaming on Peacock) is the latest of several horror yuck-yukfests to take advantage of the Steamboat Willie copyright expiration that allows jokester filmmakers out there to co-opt the old black-and-white version of Mickey for nefarious purposes. I’ve seen The Mouse Trap (surprise, it’s terrible) but have somehow let Mouseboat Massacre and Mouse of Horrors slip by me, something I could easily correct if I ever lost the will to live – which very well might happen if I have to endure any more of these things. 

SCREAMBOAT: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Once upon a time, Colin Jost and Pete Davidson bought an old Staten Island Ferry – why? Because they’re famous and because they’re rich and because they can – and it became the setting for the movie Screamboat. There’s your trivia for the day. It’s far more interesting than what happens during the course of the film’s fictional story, in which a murderous rodent, played by the guy who plays the mean clown in the Terrifier movies, kills a buncha people in totally hilarious fashion. And yes, please put the words “totally hilarious” in the scariest scare quotes possible. And no, I didn’t like the Terrifier movies because they’re lame. Llllllllllaaaaaaammmmmmme. And while I don’t have to gut out one of those f—ing things this year, I do have to endure Screamboat (and Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare), which is a questionable tradeoff.

Anyhow. I will avoid Screamboat spoilers not by revealing that people die in the movie, but by avoiding revealing how they die. Crucial distinction there. Of course, the rodent, dubbed Willie (David Howard Thornton), does all the killing. That goes without saying. He’s in the classic-slasher vein in that he offs doofuses one by one – even though he stands at roughly 22 inches tall (approximation; I did not get out the tape measure) and doesn’t seem too formidable, despite his resembling a bipedal sewer rat who ate so much moldering breaded fowlmeat from the dumpster behind the Chick-fil-a, it made him homicidally insane. I get it – he’s feral and mean and willing to do things you or I could never conceive (hint: he does not respect the sensitive nature of human genitalia), but it stands to reason that the couple dozen people he terrorizes aboard the Staten Island Ferry one fateful night could probably take him if they participated in a little teamwork.

However, teamwork requires a level of cognitive function these people lack. Our protag is a former Minnesotan named Selena (Allison Pittel), who has the implied surname of many movie characters of her ilk, Finalgirl. She – well, I was about to describe her but there’s not much to describe. I guess she’s just about had enough of New York City even before the attacks begin, but beyond that, her primary character trait is that she exists, and will try to continue existing as the movie progresses. She’s likeable enough since she expresses disdain at some of her fellow passengers, specifically the drunk group of birthday-party women who have names like Ilsa, Cindi and Bella and are garbed up like princesses. Get it? Selena pals up with a couple of competent people who manage to escape while the incompetents get wrenches to the skull and suchlike, but not until they deliver lines like “We’re gonna show you a whole new world” and “I guess it’s a small world after all.” GET IT? 

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: We’re probably generally aware of the (ugh) Twisted Childhood Universe series of cheapo exploitation movies that began with Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey and continued with Peter Pan and Bambi slabs o’ dreck, eventually leading up to a pending, and likely regrettable, movie dubbed Poohniverse: Monsters Assemble. Beyond that, a cursory search finds similar stuff outside the TCU, including nasty nasty iterations of Popeye, the Grinch, Cinderella and Alice of Wonderland fame. Knock yerselves out. 

Performance Worth Watching: It’s debatable whether it’s “worth watching” or not, but Tyler Posey turns up in the middle of this thing in a bit part. 

Memorable Dialogue: A topless woman who wants to have sex with a dorky cop, despite the fact that they’re being stalked by a nastymouse, corners him in the bathroom:

Topless woman: Can you feel the love tonight?

Dorky cop: I gotta go. There’s something wrong with the lights. And you smell like Jagermeister and – is that Nathan’s? 

Sex and Skin: Like I said. Disrespect for genitalia. 

Our Take: At the very least, Screamboat looks like Cleo from 5 to 7 compared to The Mouse Trap, or any other of the aforementioned calculated blasphemous ripoffs, for that matter. But relativity is absolutely at play here; Screamboat still sucks rocks, and has me contemplating various gradient shades of stupidity as I assess these things. That it almost succeeds at being watchable and is very nearly funny two, maybe three, times? That’s enough to earn it the foil-wrapped chocolate gold medal in the public domainsploitation Olympics. For what it’s worth. 

Credit director Steven LaMorte for stapling together a fairly comprehensible movie out of real locations, some real gooey practical FX and some almost real actors. Compare that to similarly miniscule-budgeted horror movies frequently offering visual storytelling and narrative structure that are the equivalent of throwing the loose pages of a first draft screenplay into an empty room and slamming the door shut. Screamboat makes it over the low bar of basic competence for the genre – let’s throw another FWIW in here just to be clear – even though it boasts a moment of questionable continuity that had me wondering, hey, didn’t he lose that eyeball in an earlier scene? 

BUT WHAT ABOUT THE KILLS, you sickos out there are inevitably wondering. Well, the kills are Just Fine, a couple of them memorable for their somewhat creative use of prosthetics. There’s no shortage of blood or severed appendages. Visually, the idea to render Willie with sub-munchkin stature means there’s significant visible seams and workarounds, with Thornton, unrecognizable beneath mangy gray fur, never appearing in the same frame as any of his fellow cast members. More effort could’ve been put into the snarky, satirical Disney references, which struck me as the result of a script punch-up more than a central theme; the film is more about its own self-aware attempts to deride beloved ubiquitous pop-cultural icons, hoping it inspires visions of Walt Disney in Hell, stuck in an eternal death loop of filing patent claims and lawsuits directly into a million-degree furnace. Of course, with movies like this, shittiness is a virtue, and is part of the draw, I guess, for some of you, especially if you have large amounts of free time and a large stockpile of edibles.

Our Call: Screamboat might be the best this dumb subgenre ever gets – and it’s still crapicalifragilisticexpialidocious. SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.