Studio:   DeskPop Entertainment
Director: Steven LaMorte
Writer:   Steven LaMorte, Matthew Garcia-Dunn
Producer: Steven LaMorte, Amy Schumacher, Martine Melloul, Steven Della Salla, Michael Leavy
Stars:    David Howard Thornton, Allison Pittel, Amy Schumacher, Jesse Posey, Brian Quinn, Joe DeRosa, Tyler Posey, Jesse Kove, Jarlath Conroy

Review Score:

Summary:

A murderous, mutant mouse terrorizes passengers aboard New York’s Staten Island Ferry.

Synopsis:

Aboard an old Staten Island Ferry named Mortimer, maintenance workers Neil and Dominique inadvertently release a mutant mouse, Steamboat Willie, from a sealed chamber below deck. The sentient, humanoid rodent kills Neil before attacking Dominique.

Selena, a bartender with disillusioned dreams of becoming an artist, races to the ferry to escape a quintet of obnoxious socialites drunkenly celebrating a birthday. Selena has a meet-cute moment with Pete, a ferry employee who helps her get away from the girls. Selena and Pete later reunite aboard the ferry.

While alone, Selena witness Willie, who exhibits a romantic attraction to her, murdering a police officer. Selena tries to alert Pete, an EMT named Amber, police officer Lieutenant Diaz, and First Mate Tommy, but no one believes her wild claim about a homicidal mouse wearing a hat and tiny trousers.

After brutally strangling Captain Bill Clark to death, Willie redirects the ferry’s course. Throughout the rest of the night, Willie kills numerous passengers including birthday girl Cindi and her friends as well as several cops and deckhands.

Upon finding the captain’s dead body, Tommy puts himself in charge and appoints Pete as the new first mate. Now recognizing the danger, Tommy directs Pete and Lt. Diaz to escort the passengers to the lower level for their safety. Amber also realizes Selena was telling the truth when she sees Willie using a forklift to kill Cindi’s friends Jazzy and Arianna. Willie later kills Tommy by crushing his head with a heavy monitor.

Passengers panic when they discover they’ve been mysteriously locked inside one room. Diaz calms everyone by rallying them as strong New Yorkers ready to heroically stand against a terrorist threat. However, Willie suddenly kills Diaz by thrusting a pole through his throat.

Willie stops the angry mob from assaulting him by spraying everyone with a firehose. He then triggers a power box to mass electrocute all of the passengers standing in the water.

With his mother becoming one of Willie’s victims, Matteo, the son of Borough President Molinari, ends up escorted by a burly man named Moses. Following the electrocution massacre, Moses and Matteo regroup with Selena, Amber, and Pete on the bridge.

The five survivors encounter Barry, a drunkard who was a ferry deckhand in the 1960s. Barry explains how the ferry once had a kindhearted captain named Walter, and Walt took pity on Willie when he found the mouse being transported in a cage after mad scientists abandoned their experiments on the rodent. Walt befriended Willie and set him free, but the mutant mouse became deeply disturbed and disappeared following an unknown tragedy.

Pete and Selena share a kiss while searching with Amber, Moses, and Matteo to find distress signal flares. Dominique unexpectedly knocks down Moses, revealing that since his initial attack, she has been doing Willie’s bidding to help the mouse find another one of his kind. Despite doing everything he asked, Willie viciously attacks Dominique following an encounter with Selena and Amber.

Moses sacrifices himself by firing a flare whose resulting explosion engulfs Willie and Dominique. However, the blast also blows a hole in the ferry.

With the ferry taking on water, Selena and Amber save Matteo from drowning while Pete willingly stays behind to battle Willie. Selena mourns Pete’s subsequent death.

From a photograph recovered by Matteo, Selena and Amber discover Willie had a female mate whose disappearance turned him evil, and he redirected the ferry to search for her. Selena has Amber take Matteo to safety while she uses a trunk of theater costumes to dress like Willie’s lost love.

Amber battles Willie until Selena arrives. Willie knocks Matteo into the water. Although he is initially distracted by her ruse, Willie also knocks Selena over the ferry’s railing. Flashing back to how his mate disappeared in the water the same way, however, Willie pulls Selena back to safety.

Amber distracts Willie, which allows Selena to stab him in his head with a pair of scissors. Willie falls into the water.

A rescue boat uses a life preserver to pull out Matteo and reunite him with his father, Borough President Molinari. Molinari informs Selena and Amber that they are the only known survivors of Willie’s killing spree aboard the ferry. Amber convinces Selena that the experience has hardened her as a New Yorker, so Selena decides to remain in the city to pursue her dream of becoming an artist. Meanwhile, Willie is seen aboard a trash barge reuniting with his lost love.

Review:

Considering the awful options clogging the overflowing gutter of low-budget fright flicks based on old cartoons, you could do a lot worse than “Screamboat.” I know I certainly have, particularly with each successive entry in the increasingly insufferable “Twisted Childhood Universe” series. “Screamboat” still has a fragrant “made for Tubi” aroma, but compared to its peers in public domain pillaging, it’s the closest one there is to a “real” movie, not a sloppy nothing-burger coasting entirely on the unearned attention some classic kiddie character automatically attracts.

Like those previous Popeye and Pooh projects, “Screamboat’s” big idea for appropriating Walt Disney’s original incarnation of Mickey Mouse is as simple as turning Steamboat Willie into a homicidal killer. Unlike those unmentioned movies, “Screamboat” does its murderous metamorphosis differently by making Willie more, or rather less, than a mere man in a cheap Halloween mask. Unexpectedly, “Screamboat” avoids the easy way out and instead presents Willie as a mutant mouse rendered with various effects that shrink down “Terrifier’s” Art the Clown actor David Howard Thornton to the size of a Smurf.

That’s far from the only way “Screamboat” separates itself from the redundant dullness and penny-pinching aesthetics normally associated with this subgenre. To begin with, “Screamboat” convincingly sells its New York setting with several panoramic cityscapes for establishing shots, and what looks like an authentic Staten Island Ferry interior where the crux of the carnage takes place. For once, it doesn’t seem like every set is confined to a space the size of a studio apartment, giving the production room to spread out and breathe like it has lived-in locations.

“Screamboat’s” setup can still be reductively described as “evil comic character slaughters a bunch of bodies,” but the movie comes chock full of people onscreen, which again makes the scenario feel like it unfolds on a working ferry rather than limiting everything to the same handful of amateur actors for 90 mundane minutes. There’s a varied assortment of cops, deckhands, passengers, employees, and plenty of stereotypes including drunken party girls with exaggerated accents, New York tough guys, and low-level celebrity spoofs like a naked cowboy and tourist hustler in a homemade Statue of Liberty costume.

I wouldn’t quite classify “Screamboat” as a comedy, at least not in the same sense that “Shaun of the Dead” or “Zombieland” are. But it is played with its tongue jutting through its cheek. Audience eyes initially roll at overplayed performances, accompanied by an exhausted thought of “here we go again with conceited Instagram wannabes being obnoxious.” Eventually you realize the cast deliberately plays things loose without being insincere. That realization may not prevent annoyance at some of the portrayals, though that makes it harder to come down on the movie for being humorously ham-handed at times.

There are plenty of reasons why these Saturday morning slashers come across as hollow, indistinguishable content instead of appearing connected to or truly inspired by their source material in any meaningful way. The main reason being that they’re usually too timid to risk potential legal repercussions, so they don’t bother running anything past an attorney and just make the movie as generic as possible.

“Screamboat,” on the other hand, fearlessly flirts with a cease-and-desist order by packing in plenty of winking references to Mickey Mouse, Walt Disney, and even the branded theme parks. The ferry that Steamboat Willie terrorizes is named Mortimer, a nod to Mickey’s original name before Walt’s wife convinced him to change it. Two girls do a dance called the “Dole Whip.” Willie has Mickey’s signature laugh. He also whistles Mickey’s signature song from the 1928 short. Some lines of dialogue are pulled from Disney films and song titles, and there’s even a gag where Willie raises the price of churros on a menu board by flipping a six to a nine. Whether the laughs land or not, it’s refreshing to see a sly dig at Disney Park price gouging without it being a direct punch in the face.

I can’t fathom how anyone could claim to be a fan of any of the previous Disney-related slashers and then somehow not enjoy this one. The kills are bloodier, the jokes are funnier, and the production value is exponentially more polished than anything else in this category. It’s not saying much, but I’ll take details like polo shirts with embroidered logos and consistent music that doesn’t sound like one guy did it on a Casio keyboard over the lazy plug-and-slay formula the TCU films follow. Toss in an appearance by “Day of the Dead” actor Jarlath Conroy and Cobra Kai sensei Martin Kove’s son Jesse as a confident cop who suffers a surprise demise, and you’ve got an unexpected amount of goofily good things going on.

Even if you can’t stand this brand of B-movie, and no one blames you, you might still find some fun here since the bar has sunk so low, “Screamboat” might as well be “Casablanca.” Another way to put it is, if you only watch one public domain horror movie based on an expired copyright, and no one needs to watch more than one anyway, “Screamboat” really is the best option.

NOTE: There is a mid-credits scene.

Review Score: 55