“Everything gets recycled, over and over again.”
The “public domain cinematic universe” has been one of the strangest phenomena of modern cinema. Everything from Winnie the Pooh to Popeye has received the slasher treatment – often to varying effect. Next up is Mickey Mouse himself, as the original Steamboat Willie cartoon is converted into a grisly B-movie. Unlike some of its public domain contemporaries, though, Screamboat doesn’t lean nearly enough into its premise.
Taking place on the Staten Island ferry during one fraught journey, Screamboat primarily follows Selena (Allison Pittel), one of its many passengers. Unbeknownst to her and the rest of the passengers – which include some undeniably funny nods to Disney princesses – there’s a killer mouse lurking, with a key reunion in his sights.
What’s most frustrating about Screamboat is that it actually starts out in quite promising fashion. It knows exactly how ridiculous its concept is and leans fully into that, even kicking off with an on-screen quote from Walt Disney himself. The way it explains the mouse’s origin is suitably meta, as well, and there are occasional references to the House of Mouse’s classic films – including one very silly animated sequence. It’s just as tongue-in-cheek as you’d hope for, which is initially enough to paper over the cracks of a barebones plot.
However, practically everything else about Screamboat is either frustrating or downright boring. The film is visually bland, often looking muddy with poorly lit scenes, lifeless environments, and absolutely nothing by way of visual flair. David Howard Thornton’s performance as Steamboat Willie is equally disappointing, too. He’s playing it exactly the same as he does Art the Clown in the Terrifier films, with no apparent effort to differentiate between his characters – certainly a shame. At least when he gets to killing, the practical gore is suitably schlocky.
On a character level, there’s simply nothing here either. The protagonist, Selena, has no personality at all, leaving the audience with no incentive to connect with her in any way. She’s not only poorly written, but what little characterisation does exist positions her as painfully self-centred – not the plucky final girl you’d want to root for. The rest of the cast is just as barebones, and while it’s clearly not trying to reinvent the wheel in terms of its narrative work, it would still be nice to care about the fate of these characters.
While its shared leading man makes it easy to compare Screamboat to Terrifer, positioning it alongside the Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey duology is a far more fitting comparison. This pales in comparison to those films: it makes no effort to organically weave its IP origin into the story, instead dumping it in a few expository scenes, it isn’t particularly loyal to this source material – and worst of all, it’s just quite boring. It feels like there was the bones of a low-budget slasher here already, and that the filmmakers rather opportunistically shoehorned the Disney backstory and connections in at the last minute.
This is the main issue with Screamboat compared to other public domain slashers: it’s just surprisingly dull. The early sparks of ridiculousness, of which there are many, are welcomed and get things off to a good start, but it falls onto the slasher genre’s laziest habits not too soon after. Rather confidently, we already know that this killer incarnation of Steamboat Willie will return – I just hope next time, it actually does something more meaningful with the source material beyond a few shoehorned references.
★½
Screamboat released only at Vue on April 2 and will come to digital platforms on May 5 and DVD and Blu-ray on June 2.
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