Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Mouse Trap’ on Peacock, a Mickey Mouse Slasher Movie That Disney Doesn’t Want You To See

Straight up: The Mouse Trap (now streaming on Peacock) makes Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey look like The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. Just when you thought trolling Disney’s expired copyrights couldn’t get any more lame and shitty, along comes this slapped-together hunk of dreck with a Dollar Tree-adjacent budget, filmed in a family-entertainment center that’s probably also physically Dollar Tree-adjacent. The Mouse Trap takes advantage of the recent entry of Steamboat Willie, the animated short featuring the first appearance of Mickey Mouse, into the public domain, turning everyone’s favorite rodent mascot (and symbol of capitalism) into a deranged slasher. Reader, I wasn’t amused. And reader, you won’t be either.

THE MOUSE TRAP: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: We open with a Star Wars-style crawl, rife with jabs at Disney and its many properties. It’s also rife with typos. (Note to the filmmakers, “trade mark” is all one word, which means it doesn’t have a space in the middle of it.) Next we meet Rebecca (Mackenzie Mills), a goth girl who’s in jail trying to explain the events of a fateful evening to two cops. They apparently think she’s the perpetrator of several gruesome murders, which were in fact committed not just by a guy in a Mickey Mouse mask, but a guy in a Mickey Mouse mask who can teleport. Although these cops seem to share a Nyquil cupful of liquid gray matter between them, I don’t blame them. I’d opt for the goth girl, too.

But I’d be wrong. Unless I’m hallucinating – and The Mouse Trap is a movie to inspire a waking-sleep trance in which one sees improbable things – a guy in a Mickey Mouse mask who can teleport did, indeed, kill a bunch of twits, but not before we have to suffer through 40 minutes of their insipid f—ing dialogue. The main twit is Alex (Sophie McIntosh), who works at a superhappyfuntime fun center; her friends drop by the joint to throw her an after-hours 21st-birthday party. Her boss is Tim (Simon Phillips, who also “wrote” the “screenplay”), who sits down to watch his personal celluloid copy of Steamboat Willie, when suddenly, his era-specific Mickey Mouse mask talks him into donning the mask and going on a homicidal rampage. Don’t you hate it when that happens? I know I do, and my therapist is getting really sick of hearing about it.

What follows is a collection of spatially confusing scenes occurring in the jungle gym, kiddie rides, the don’t-bump-into-the-masked-user red zone of virtual-reality games, etc. That there’s no ball-pit sequence feels like a missed opportunity. Anyway, Mickey Mask watches a couple of the twits scrump in the laser tag (at least he gets to watch, since the nookie is merely implied) before killing them, stalks in and out of the frame, vanishes into thin air only to appear on the other side of the room, and all that. The twits learn that he doesn’t like strobe lights, although a few of them seem alarmingly content with sitting still and not fighting back while the maniac slits their throats. I do hope Goofy gets better spoof treatment than this, although odds are it couldn’t get much worse.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Sorry, I’ve made enough Bunuel references for today.

Performance Worth Watching: (Clenched-teeth emoji)

Memorable Dialogue: Alex: “It’s a game of cat and mouse. And the only way to win is to kill that goddamn mouse.”

Sex and Skin: Nope.

Our Take: The Mouse Trap delivers more than you might expect, in the sense that it’s far more stultifyingly moronic and boring than anticipated. More than half the movie passes before anyone dies, and it feels like an eternity, because these characters are empty-headed insufferables played by actors hung out to dry on the decayed and withering ends of a clothesline of godawful dialogue. The movie plays out as if director Jamie Bailey wandered through a Chuck E. Cheese, came up with some “sequences,” shot them overnight when the location rental was cheapest, then edited them together with a tongue scraper. 

I get it: If anyone/thing needs to be jabbed in the ribs, it’s the Disney corp, which has appropriated and capitalized on classic public-domain properties (Cinderella, Pinocchio, Snow White, etc.) so much, entire generations were gaslit into believing they were original ideas. But man, The Mouse Trap is lazy, with its self-aware Screamisms haphazardly tossed into a mush of dull hogwash with no suspense or tension, no funny or creative kills, no discernable filmmaking skill behind it and no hope whatsoever. You may just walk away from it thinking satire is as dead as ol’ Walt himself.

Our Call: Mouse crap! SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.