SCREAMBOAT Review: A Small Mouse Makes for Big Kills and Laughs

On a foggy New York night, the last ferry to Staten Island is about to leave before rides across the Hudson River are shut down due to the poor weather.

 

Our three main characters are Selena, a full-time waitress and aspiring fashion designer, who is in a mad rush to get onto the ferry, desperate to escape the cackles of a small band of drunk Staten Island Girls out for a night on the town, whom she served drinks to all night at her job. She runs into Pete, a young deckhand on the ferry, who promises to run interference for her while she escapes to the lower deck. Then there is Amber, an EMT on duty on the ferry that night, making the rounds checking in on familiar faces and the other passengers.

 

Unbeknownst to them, sealed away in the hold since the 1920s, by one of the ferry’s first captains, Captain Walt, waits the tiny terror, an over sized homicidal mouse known as Screamboat Willie. This ferry is due to be decommissioned soon so one of the crew is down below looking to take a piece of history with them to make a tiny profit at auction. They set Willie loose, and his runty reign of horror begins. 

 

When the 1928 Disney cartoon Steamboat Willie and that version of Mickey Mouse entered into the public domain at the start of 2024, there was a mad dash to see who would capitalize on it and make a horror parody of the property. Steven LaMorte, who created The Mean One, 2022's horror parody of The Grinch Who Stole Christmas, locked in on the property, and this week his… interpretation… of the classic cartoon, Screamboat, pulls up to cinemas this week. 

 

To play the killer mouse, LaMorte reunited with his star from The Mean One, emerging horror icon David Howard Thornton, who is well on his way to cementing his reputation as the Charlie Chaplin of Horror, the Buster Keaton of Horror, or the Harold Lloyd of Horror. The actor now known for not speaking while in character has traded in the clown suit that has made him a household name in horror homes.

 

This time around, the actor dons a decrepit mouse costume and makeup. The mannerisms are still there, familiar motions and body mechanics in his physical comedy that we all got to know when Thornton played Art the Clown in the Terrifier series of films. However, he is allowed to make sounds in this one. Willie whistles familiar theme tunes when he is on his way to a kill someone.  

 

To portray the dimunative demon on screen, a combination of digital compositing and puppetry is used. Honestly, the puppetry, as clunky and awkward as it looks, adds a kind of wondrous element to the whole thing. There is something pure about watching a shaky puppet hobble across the deck of the bridge. It sparked a small wave of nostalgia of the glory days of '80s little creature movies, in the same way Steven Kostanski had done last year with Frankie Freako. 

 

Most of the kills are done in camera, practically, and result in glorious showers of blood and gore. In true slasher form, they are mostly stabbings, gutting, and removal of body parts. The violence is steady and, at times, pretty creative.

 

One concern we felt while watching is that there is a mass killing about halfway through the pic that left us wondering who else among the accepteble number of fodder was left for Willie to kill. You are halfway through the pic and you cannot start killing off your final handful of victims for a while yet. Then, complete randos start popping up, and it is just not the same. We think what we were missing was not some kind of attachment to the victims but some kind of recognition, at least. Sure, you are feeding our bloodlust, but it began to not feel the same as the first batch of kills. 

 

We concede that Screamboat is a bit crude, contrary to the sweet, budding romance between Selena and Pete. You know, budding as much as it can be while a king-sized rodent murders everyone on board, other sexy shenanigans are going on elsewhere.

 

The obligatory bare-breasted moment turns into a wonderful bit of Bobbitt-based horror that gets a funnier callback later in the movie. The moment you see the character Jamie early in the film, you just know, “Yep. She’s going to take her shirt off later in the movie”.

 

Likewise, there is a moment where two of the Staten Island Girls are practicing their Ahegao faces when Willie comes across them and dispatches the pair accordingly. Both are highlight kills in the movie and fall under one of the golden rules of horror flicks: if you do anything remotely sexy, you are going to die shortly after. 

 

Screamboat is funny. We will admit that we were a wee bit defensive before watching the pic. We  have not been keen on the idea of these horror parodies, this trend of late, turning something that we loved as kids, and are loved by kids to this day, and peverting them by turning them into horror flicks. We cried softly, is nothing sacred? And when someone makes one, then a handful of others crop up, trying to cash in on the trend. The horror business ruins horror movies.

 

But we took a chance on this one, and gosh darned it, we were entertained. Screamboat is not trying to be anything progressive or something that will elevate the genre. It is one hundred minutes of campy gore, cheap thrills and kills and at times is funny and crude. It does feel like it loses some… steam… late into the story. But, yeah, we were entertained by it. 

 

Also, there appear to be many Disney easter eggs scattered about the set and in the script. Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, Mary Poppins and Frozen were some of the ones that we picked up while watching it. Repeat viewings would reward us with more as we are positive that there were some earlier on in the script that we did not stop and double back on; moments where we thought, ‘Wait, did they just reference such and such a movie?’ If you are going to make a drinking game out of the viewing experience, make it Spot the Disney Reference. 

 

Drinking is not necessary to make the viewing experience better in this instance. That is praise enough, right?