HALLOWEEN HANGOVER: SCREAMBOAT (2025) ** ½

This is the second public domain slasher flick I’ve seen starring Mickey Mouse.  This one is from Steven LaMorte, the director of The Mean One and features that film’s star, David Howard (Art the Clown) Thornton as Mickey.  While it is a step up from that flick, it never quite lives up to its potential. 

After an inspirational quote from “Walt D.”, the plot begins.  People aboard the Staten Island ferry are being picked off one by one by a whistling minuscule murderous mouse named Screamboat Willie (Thornton).  Among the doomed passengers are a bunch of women having a birthday party who are dressed up as Disney princesses.  This is probably the most inspired touch in the movie, and some of the in-jokes are pretty funny.  (At one point, Ariel says, “I wanna be where the people are!”)

The gore is pretty good too.  A nose is bit off, a person gets stabbed through the head, there are decapitations, a pretty good double kill involving a forklift, a broomstick through the throat, electrocution, head crushing, spearing, face melting, and immolation.  The standout moment is when Willie cuts off a guy’s dick mid-blowjob.  Uncle Walt would be proud. 

All of this is fun up to a certain point.  (I liked the moment that cribbed from Deep Blue Sea.)  The problem is the bloated running time.  There’s no reason a slasher movie based on a public domain cartoon character needs to be one-hundred-and-two minutes long.  Heck, seventy-two minutes would’ve been pushing it.  Having not one but two characters playing up to the title mouse’s affections in the third act was a bit much too. 

Making Willie a small mouse (he’s about the size of a stuffed animal) was kind of an odd choice.  It doesn’t help that some of the forced perspective shots to make him look tiny don’t really work.  They should’ve just made him a human-sized character; logic be damned. 

Day of the Dead’s Jarlath Conroy gets the best line of the movie while relating Screamboat Willie’s origin story:  “Things get recycled over and over again.  It saves money!”

HALLOWEEN HANGOVER: SCREAMTIME (1984) ** ½

I always try to sneak in an anthology horror flick during The 31 Days of Horror-Ween/Halloween Hangover.  I’m especially a sucker for one from the ‘80s.  While not exactly a memorable addition to the subgenre, Screamtime is nevertheless a breezy way to kill eighty-nine minutes. 

In the wraparound segments (***) a couple of friends steal some horror tapes from a video store on 42nd Street.  The movies wind up being the “stories” that make up the anthology.  It’s kind of a neat wraparound for something like this.  I just wish the camera stayed a bit longer on the old theater marquees and on the shelves of the video store.  While these segments are short, they manage to tie everything together in a fun way at the end. 

The first tale (** ½) is about an old puppeteer who is perpetually henpecked by his wife and picked on by his crazy stepson.  Shortly after the punk kid sets fire to his puppets, people who’ve wronged the puppeteer begin dying.  But who’s getting revenge?  The puppets, or the puppeteer?  This is a solid if unspectacular little chiller.  The close-ups of the puppets during the murder scenes are fairly effective even if the kills themselves aren’t all that great.  While the set-up is sound, the finale ends abruptly.  Overall, it’s not bad though. 

The next story (** ½) revolves around a married couple who are gifted a rundown old house.  Before long, the wife is seeing ghost kids playing in the backyard and finding bloody knives in the kitchen.  She gets in contact with a kooky psychic (“Some of my best friends are ghosts!”) who unfortunately is unable to help.  This one starts off slow, and while it suffers from some unnecessary stalling tactics, the ending works rather well. 

The final segment (**) is about a young handyman who goes to work for a pair of eccentric old women who have a bunch of garden gnomes in their yard.  When he sees how much money the ladies keep around, the handyman decides to rip the place off.  Little does he know the gnomes also act as a deadly means of home security.  While no means “bad”, this tale suffers from similarities to the first story (young hooligans doing wrong to elderly people who have diminutive creatures defending them).  I’ll admit, the sight of a little person dressed as a garden gnome attacking people is pretty funny.  However, the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink ending (which includes a nod to Carrie and a zombie attack) is way too uneven to be successful. 

Due to their very nature, horror anthologies tend to be uneven.  Screamtime is surprisingly consistent in terms of quality from story to story.  The biggest difference is that the tales feature a British cast and the wraparounds star Americans.  (One of our American couch potatoes says, “This is a British movie!  I can tell by the way they talk!”)