Hold onto your butts… I don’t want to blow your minds or anything, but The Mouse Trap – the Steamboat Willie/Mickey Mouse is in the Public Domain exploitation flick – is a pretty shitty movie.

Yes, this is the sad but inevitable repercussion of Disney letting its earliest Mickey Mouse copyright slide into the public domain. A shitty, awful, no good “ironic” slasher film that just puts a shitty, awful, no good Mickey Mouse mask on a dude and calls it a day.

Specifically, a bunch of friends are trapped in an arcade/fun center while a version of Steamboat Willie escapes his silent film and goes on a rampage. A very very slow, very boring rampage.

The movie starts with a text crawl in space assuring us that this film is definitely not associated with Disney or any of its affiliates. And I genuinely chuckled at how long this bit went. It reminded of that time a moose bit my sister.

And even in the first act, I was moderately kinda sorta enjoying the Z grade writing and acting. Nothing wrong with the characters and actors as long as you don’t mind an obvious low budget. It’s clearly a movie thrown together on a nickel and a dime, but within those constraints, it seemed ok.

But it all goes downhill when the bad guy in the really shitty Mickey Mouse mask appears. A muscle-bound slasher who doesn’t even try to sound like Mickey Mouse… probably because Mickey’s voice isn’t in the public domain yet.

And when I think more about the copyright hot potato the film juggles more than the shitty slasher film it is, you pretty much know this flick is going downhill. It spirals into tedium, bad and ineffective slasher kills, and almost nothing to do with Mickey Mouse except the use of Steamboat Willie clips… and a shitty mask (did I mention the shitty mask yet?).

Also, maybe they shouldn’t worry about a Disney lawsuit when they should be looking over their shoulders for Hasbro lawyers. And since they are in an arcade, Namco might want to have a word about the appearance of Pac-Man throughout the film.

Don’t let your curiosity get the better of you. This is bad and not even funny bad. It’s just low budget trash hoping to scam people like me into giving it a try. As a horror – as a slasher- it’s terrible… as anything to do with Mickey Mouse, it’s just mercenary, exploitation in-name-only garbage.

Score: 56