‘Screamboat’ Review: Mickey Mouse of 1,000 Corpses

Mickey Mouse is a beloved, wholesome children’s icon, and he has been for nearly 100 years. So it’s sick and perverse to watch a Mickey Mouse film featuring brutal decapitations, homicidal skeletons, kidnapping and torture. Any filmmaker who would bring that level of despicable violence into the world of Mickey Mouse should be deeply ashamed of themselves.

By the way, that filmmaker’s name is Walt Disney.

“The Mad Doctor” was a creepily animated Mickey Mouse short released in 1933, whose imagery was, at the time, considered so gruesome that it quickly fell out of circulation and into the public domain. Even Uncle Walt thought severed heads were perfectly acceptable in a Mickey Mouse movie. So before anyone gets up in arms that Steven LaMorte’s “Screamboat” shows Mickey slaughtering the passengers of the Staten Island Ferry, try to remember: Disney did it first.

Then again I’m not sure anyone is actually upset about “Screamboat.” It’s just the latest installment in a weird little subgenre. As soon as any family-friendly artistic work enters the public domain — after a decades-long delay in that process, dubbed “The Mickey Mouse Protection Act” — they all seem to get turned into slasher movies. “Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey” was the opening salvo in this odd little fad, a film that was largely incompetent but also a little punk rock. If nothing else Winnie stuck it to the man, undermining Disney’s bland, questionable, decades-long exploitation of A.A. Milne’s classic story.

But now every public domain character has its own horror movie reimaginactment, like Peter Pan and Bambi. That’s not a problem in-and-of-itself but is this really what we’ve been waiting for all these decades? For our beloved characters and tales to finally enter the public domain, just so we can squirt out cheap horror flicks where they sever our genitalia? Will Chic Young’s “Blondie” feed Dagwood a super-tall sandwich made out of Mr. Dithers’ entrails as soon as those comic characters are fair game in 2026? Does anybody have any other bright ideas? Or dark ones that aren’t the same thing over and over again?

Then again if we absolutely must have low-budget spree killer movies starring classic cartoon icons, I hope they’re at least as good as “Screamboat.” This campy, scary movie riff on “Steamboat Willie” has distinctive characters, wild gore gags, and it’s even shot on an actual, hones-to-goodness boat. That’s a low bar to clear but I’m not sure all of these public domain slashers could climb over it. “Screamboat” is not a great movie by any stretch but if Ricky Jay was editing this footage in a scene from “Boogie Nights,” he’d have to turn to Burt Reynolds and admit: “It’s a real film.”

The story begins with Steamboat Willie, an anthropomorphic mouse the size of a very large rat, escaping from his prison inside the Staten Island Ferry. It’s a foggy night, and a cavalcade of fodder — I mean “archetypes,” I mean “characters” — pile onto the ship. There’s a birthday party with stuck-up party girl princesses with names like “Cindi” and “Bella” and “Jazzy,” who look suspiciously familiar to anybody who cares enough about Disney to see a film called “Screamboat.” There’s an aspiring clothing designer named Selena (Allison Pittell, “Stream”) who will probably make it all the way to the end of the movie, and a little kid who will have to be saved a lot, and a love interest, and a helpful EMT, and a guitar player wearing nothing but tighty-whities. Et cetera, et cetera.

Almost all of them will be murdered by Willie, played by “Terrifier’s” David Howard Thornton as a demonic little troll, trapped halfway between Mike Meyers’ from “The Cat in the Hat” and the goofiest Freddy Krueger from “Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare.” He’ll cut a guy’s wiener off and spray his previously-occupied girlfriend’s face in an “Evil Dead II” geyser of blood, but he’s a playful scamp about it.

Not that this makes any sense. The backstory for the evil version of Steamboat Willie has a lot in common with the evil Pooh Bear in “Blood and Honey,” painting the character as an innocent soul corrupted by emotional and physical neglect. The implication is that even Mother Teresa would go on a homicidal rampage if you locked her in a cargo hold long enough, and I’m not entirely sure that’s true. Yhen again I’m not Mother Teresa’s biographer. For all I know this theory is spot-on.

The point is that for all of director and co-writer Steven LaMorte’s manic energy and grotesque chicanery, “Screamboat” never feels like more than an excuse to make “Screamboat.” That LaMorte made “Screamboat” better than it probably had any right to be, a truly watchable exercise in lo-fi, drive-in movie theater kitsch, is a welcome surprise. But one can’t help long for the day when characters like Mickey Mouse enter the public domain and someone — out of all the billions of people who now have the legal right to tell any Mickey Mouse story they want — has something to say about them.

Until then I guess we’ll settle for the “Itchy and Scratchy Movie,” minus Scratchy.

“Screamboat” scurries into theaters April 2, 2025.

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