‘The Mouse Trap’ Review
Stars: Damir Kovic, Nick Biskupek, Mackenzie Mills, Sophie McIntosh, Madeline Kelman, Simon Phillips | Written by Simon Phillips | Directed by Jamie Bailey
We’ve had Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey as well as its sequel, and a horror movie centred around Bambi is on the way. But the film that must really piss Disney off is The Mouse Trap. Filmed as Mickey’s Mouse Trap, which was probably a bit too much for the lawyers to allow, it turns their iconic rodent, or someone dressed him, into a psychotic killer.
A film like The Mouse Trap is only possible because the original Mickey Mouse cartoon, Steamboat Willie, finally slipped out from under copyright protection and into the public domain. So now Mickey, or the version of him in that cartoon, is fair game for other filmmakers. Something that a Star Wars-style open text crawl reminds the viewer of.
The actual film opens on Wednesday, March 13th as Detectives Cole (Damir Kovic; Disasters at Sea) and Marsh (Nick Biskupek; Ash & Dust, Butchers Book Two: Raghorn) prepare to question Rebecca (Mackenzie Mills; Second Shot) about a string of murders which left her as the only survivor. She warns them they don’t want to know, but they persist, and we see the film as she tells them what they want to know.
Alex (Sophie McIntosh; The Sacrifice Game, The Day Lacey Called) is turning twenty-one, unfortunately, she’s doing it while stuck working a late shift at the Fun Haven arcade. It seems a group has rented the place out for an after-hours party of their own, so she and Jayna (Madeline Kelman; Skin Deep) get to put in some double-time hours. After giving them the good news, their boss, Mr. Collins (Simon Phillips; Butchers, The Last Scout) retires to his office to have a drink and watch Steamboat Willie. Something is about to go very, very wrong.
Directed by Jamie Bailey (This Was America, What Lurks Beneath) from a script by Phillips, The Mouse Trap makes its biggest mistake at the start and frequently keeps going back to it as the film pauses for more scenes of the cops interviewing Rebecca who seems to know a lot of things there’s no way she could know. Apart from being something of a spoiler, the interruptions keep killing the plot’s momentum in an attempt to be a slasher take on The Usual Suspects.
Not that the plot is anything original, the party turns out, not so surprisingly, to be her friends surprising her, and the film settles into a familiar stalk-and-slash pattern. It does however throw a curve at the viewer when, after you’re certain that you know who’s in the mask, you’re proven very wrong. How? The killer teleports, then freaks out when a light strobes on them. Could it actually be Mickey?
But apart from that, The Mouse Trap is a fairly generic low-budget slasher with a mix of off-screen and decent, if basic, practical effects for the deaths we do see. The film’s one really suspenseful scene involves the killer messing with someone wearing VR goggles before they dispatch them. But apart from that it’s nothing special, and in the case of the ending, and the post-credits scene, barely even average.
To be honest, I do wonder if The Mouse Trap didn’t suffer some post-production tampering. There’s more than one scene where the dialogue appears to be dubbed. Did some of the plot cross the line and have to be reworked to keep the lawyers at bay? That would explain why the police station scenes are so frequent. They needed the constant exposition to explain what was left of the plot.
Regardless of the reasons, The Mouse Trap is another film where too much effort was put into being the first to come out with a film about the character and too little effort was put into making it good. The only real reason to watch this is out of morbid curiosity. Next time, maybe the filmmakers can find a character coming into the public domain in a couple of years, so they have time to write a decent script.
*½ 1.5/5
Gravitas Ventures has released The Mouse Trap on Digital and VOD Platforms. It will be available on DVD and Blu-ray August 13th.
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