Runtime: 80 of the longest minutes of my life!
“Directed” by: Jamie Bailey
“Starring”: Actors I’ll be nice and not name here
From: Companies who shouldn’t have made this despite the public domain thing
There are reasons why I’ve avoided the onslaught of cartoons and other children’s entertainment turned into cheap horror movies after reaching public domain status… at least with The Mouse Trap, it’s one of the worst I’ve ever seen! Generally, how terribly they are rated both on Letterboxd & other sites are sufficient reasons alone. That said, I suppose it’s most fair for everyone to judge for myself rather than making assumptions.
Well, this is bloody awful! I can say that not just for having witnessed such an abomination, but because a key character is randomly British. He’s Tim Collins, the owner of a random arcade where we only see two astoundingly irritating employees work there… yet I need to start at the very opening of the movie. There’s literally yellow Star Wars scrolling text against a star field background! It’s a disclaimer saying this trash isn’t affiliated w/ Disney… only it’s done in the most aggravating, rambling “this is apparently modern humor now, and I’ll always despise it” way, the first of numerous occasions where the “humor” landed with a thud, it missed the mark so poorly.
The opening act also featured a lethal combination of awful caricatures of children, line readings that unfortunately sometimes sounded like they were delivered by AI voices, bad music (yes, including the song from an act known as BLAIR GUN, no lie), and even more terrible characters that are a random girl-best described as “Temu Jenna Ortega as Wednesday Addams” who survived the night and the two detectives who interviewed her.
The caricatures don't stop, believe me; people show up as there’s an after-hours party at the arcade… one adult male is OK with another guy getting lead girl Alex drunk so she can be taken advantage of! That makes “Not Jason Mewes as Jay” look better only by comparison… he’s still an A-hole who constantly drops F-bombs. Another guy was an obvious riff on Randy from Scream!
I couldn’t even begin to tell you everything wrong with The Mouse Trap. However, three big issues…
One, Mike has movie memorabilia in a room at the arcade, including an old Mickey Mouse. The Mouse mask talks to him… and this convinces him to put the mask on and become a psycho killer. I dunno..
Two: Our Mickey Mouse killer teleports multiple times & possesses other supernatural powers, yet he has a phobia of something so range-inducing in its stupidity, it defies belief. Then again, this is a movie so stupid that the kills have no tie to Mickey Mouse or any cartoon.
Three: This was 80 minutes of pure agony between the dialogue, the characters, the complete lack of logic with everything—it really is one of the worst films I’ve ever seen. As wretched as Ice Cube’s War of the World was, at least I could laugh at its ineptitude—but not with The Mouse Trap.
If this nightmare wasn’t incompetent enough, my feeling at this moment was that the final minute here was the worst I’ve ever seen in a motion picture, no lie. It was a giant middle finger to the brave souls that were like me and somehow made it to the end without shutting it off in disgust. OK, allegedly there’s a post-credits scene (!) but I couldn’t hit “stop” fast enough.
Like I said, a dissertation needs to be done for the purpose of explaining how this is one of the worst I’ve ever seen and why it made me so angry. There’s some other films involving Mickey w/ the Steamboat Willie ’28 look which have to be better than this—so are the multiple Popeye films that were excreted out on Prime this year. Heck, even the much-reviled Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey can’t truly be as much a war crime as The Mouse Trap was… right?! Don’t expect me to find out for myself!
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