After 95 years, the copyright runs, and then fictional creations end up in the public domain-even the brand-conscious mega group Disney cannot change that. And so a completely new sub-genre has emerged in recent years, in which popular children's book and cartoon characters suddenly appear as bloodthirsty monsters. The trend of the “Winnie The Pooh: Blood and Honey”, as super-brutal as well as super-cheap, started, in which the sadistic psycho-killers do not even wear the PU bear and piglet made particularly elaborately. The result: In the cinema alone, more than 50 times (!) Of the mini budget of $ 100,000 was recorded. No wonder that it was far from over. Instead, followed in the so -called Poohnive Then also “Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey II”, “Bambi: The Reckoning” and “Peter Pan's Neverland Nightmare”.
On January 1, 2024, the public domain horror got another very special push, because that day officially the copyright for “Steamboat Willie” from 1928. The special thing about it: In the eight-minute cartoon by Walt Disney and UB Iwerk, none other than Micky Maus appeared their first appearance-and so suddenly everyone was allowed to use the most famous of all Disney figures for their own works. It all started with the miserable “The Mouse Trap”, a usual cheap slasher, in which the killer simply overturns a Mickey mouse mask before starting butching-nobody really needs that. The Gore comedy “Screamboat“On the other hand, the producers of” Terrifier 2 “and” Terriftier 3 ” – and even if a film with quite long lengths came out, they have at least operated a completely different level of effort.
The murder-lifting Willie is embodied by none other than Art-Der-Clown “Terifier” star David Howard Thornton.
In search of souvenirs that could be embroidered on the Internet, a thief unleash the incredible horror: In the past, the mouse Willie (David Howard Thornton) proudly sails over the world's oceans. But after her captain went overboard, she was locked up in a tiny storage room of the Staten Island ferry. In complete isolation, the amiable mouse mutated into a vengeful monster – and that is now free to drive her bloody mischief on a nightly, particularly stormy crossing from Long Island to Manhattan …
How big is Micky Mouse?
In “Screamboat”, director and author Steven Lamort is not satisfied with just putting on a Mickey mouse mask to his killer. Instead, the hairy monster is personally embodied by art-der-clown actor David Howard Thornton. In the total you can see that Micky is roughly the size of a teddy bear – and so Thornton must of course be reduced a whole piece for his close -ups. This does not happen here through CGI tricks, but by simple Green screen recordings of Thornton in the mouse costume, which-in view of the budget even surprisingly convincingly-are inserted into the actual film images. Only the size varies from setting to attitude, which is why it can hardly be said until the end how big the figure is really. At the same time, this approach gives the film a playful, appropriately cartoon effect.
Where David Howard Thornton still laughed as a type of clown, he whistles as Steamboat Willie the iconic title song of the cartoon classic. What has not changed, on the other hand, is his preference for over-the-top gore: In “Screamboat” he not only speaks up two heads with the tines of a forklift, he hits your penis just very happy ferry captain in the middle of a blowjob-and with that, playing with the driven out, but still not against the rules of biology is still not the case over. In contrast to the “Terifier” series, the gore never turns the wink to the transgressive, but as an appetizer during the long waiting for “Terifier 4”, “Screamboat” delivers-also thanks to the quite convincing make-up effects.
A birthday party group with dresses based on Disney princesses also checks in on the fatal ferry …
The fact that “Screamboat” seems to be of higher quality than most comparable productions is also due to the fact that it was not shot in a single house or a warehouse, but actually on a retired state of Island. This became possible because Pete Davidson (“Bodies Bodies Bodies”), together with his “Saturday Night Live” colleague Colin Jost (the husband of Scarlett Johansson) and the comedy club owner Paul Italia, bought the ferry for an amount of $ 280,100. According to his own statements, the comedy superstar was “very well-known” at this point. In any case, the plan in the spontaneous acquisition was to convert the ship into a floating entertainment center with hotel, restaurants, bars, cinema and event rooms. But so far that has only been progressing, which is why “Screamboat” was now able to use the ferry as a location.
The only problem is that the budget on the other hand was not enough to populate the large ship with a correspondingly large group of institutions. It is in the middle of the night and there is a storm, so it makes sense that the ferry is not completely filled. But in “Screamboat” it is so empty that the sets and thus in the end the whole film also seem strangely lifeless. Where there is a lack of an extent, the human cast, on the other hand, is unnecessarily inflated: None of the figures is only interesting in the beginning, they are obviously all that Micky can take them apart in the best possible way-and yet Steven Lamorte blows his film with this excessive arsenal. The journey with the real state ferry takes an average of 25 minutes – whoever came up with the hell came up with the idea that 102 minutes would be a suitable length for “Screamboat”?
Conclusion: “Screamboat” makes a lot better than the competition in the genre of the public domain horror. Only he got far too long at 102 minutes, which is why the killer micky constantly runs out in between. In contrast to the superbilly slasher scrap “The Mouse Trap”, the much more complex produced “Screamboat” is worth a look at least for Gore fans.