Dir: Steven LaMorte. With: David Howard Thornton, Tyler Posey, Jesse Kove, Kailey Hyman. 101 mins. Cert: 18
Here’s another draining bout of horror opportunism, spawned in this instance by the copyright expiring on Disney’s Steamboat Willie, the 1928 animation landmark that launched Mickey Mouse into the world. Steven LaMorte’s bloody pastiche opens with a quote coyly ascribed to “Walt D.” before plodding mirthlessly along in the pawprints of those recent Winnie the Pooh carve-ups, demonstrating no greater brio, invention or wit. Its mock Mickey is a genetically modified, psychopathic pipsqueak (Terrifier breakout David Howard Thornton, in mangy rodent costume), loosed from the sewers by blundering engineers; rather than the jaunty steamboat his predecessor commandeered, he wreaks murderous havoc on a grimy approximation of the Staten Island Ferry, whistling while he works.
The whole never recovers from its leaden opening half-hour, devoted to lugging potential corpses aboard and setting us to wonder who, if anyone, will survive the lacklustre carnage. (Hopes are lowered like a flag for the airheaded bachelorette party sent this way with an eye towards content creation.) LaMorte notionally expands the scope of his non-satirical attack by having the critter’s victims mouth familiar Magic Kingdom buzzwords. “Can you feel the love tonight?” winks one topless passenger, shortly before being hosed down with gore, a severed penis tumbling from her lips. One point in these cheap-and-cheerless cash-ins’ favour: in an era of dead-eyed data scraping, they may yet radicalise a generation of sleepover attendees to pursue ways of toughening up copyright law.
Arterial-spray sickos won’t feel shortchanged, but just as many kill scenes are torpedoed by a prevailing poverty of lighting, clumsy-to-inept coverage and cutting, and effects that only erratically match the action. Amid a raft of Sharknado-level performances, accidentally serving the public by muffling dialogue that wasn’t exactly sparkling to begin with, Thornton grants his Mickey a certain bouncy malevolence – but we get the idea after only a few minutes of watching the actor tapdancing on a pop-culture grave. These tacky novelty items have been unlucky to land at a moment when mainstream horror has seriously raised its game; but something as cut-price, retrograde and reactionary as this really does deserve the damning label of Mickey Mouse fare.
Screamboat opens in cinemas nationwide today.
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