There’s a version of The Mouse Trap that could’ve been gleefully unhinged: a grimy Canadian slasher where a bootleg Steamboat Willie crawls out of copyright hell and starts shanking twenty-somethings between skee-ball machines. Instead, we get this version—an 80-minute shrug that proves even murder in a Mickey mask can be boring if you try hard enough.
The hook practically writes itself: Steamboat Willie enters the public domain on January 1, 2024, and the filmmakers immediately announce a “Mickey Mouse slasher” that looks like it was conceived in the comments section of a horror meme page. Director Jamie Bailey even said they “just wanted to have fun with it all,” because “it’s Steamboat Willie’s Mickey Mouse murdering people. It’s ridiculous.” Which is true. It is ridiculous. What’s wild is how little fun there actually is.
The plot is the most off-brand party you’ve ever attended. Alex, a 21-year-old arcade employee, gets stuck on a late shift. Her boss, Tim, screens Steamboat Willie, finds a Mickey mask that talks to him, and promptly becomes hypnotized murder-Mouse. Alex’s friends show up for a surprise birthday party: phones collected, exits chained, common sense missing in action. Then “Mickey” starts teleporting around the arcade, stabbing people in a jungle gym and laser tag arena like he’s auditioning for Chuck E. Cheese’s Most Wanted.
Structurally, it’s the same slasher Mad Libs you’ve seen a hundred times: horny couple killed first, phones conveniently removed, everyone splits up, people wander into dark rooms alone, and the final girl survives just long enough to make you wish she’d left when she saw the chains on the doors. It doesn’t even try to subvert the formula; it just cosplays as a better movie that never shows up. More than one review has described it as using a “very basic slasher formula” and doing absolutely nothing interesting with it.
Then there’s the killer. Look, if you’re going to build your entire marketing campaign around “killer Mickey Mouse,” you’d better bring something: a twisted personality, a vicious sense of humor, some kind of satirical bite at Disney’s squeaky-clean empire. Instead, Mickey is just… a guy with a knife and teleportation powers who’s afraid of bright lights. That’s it. No parody, no real commentary, not even a half-hearted attempt to mimic the famous voice. As one critic put it, the whole thing feels like a joke with “a promising-enough setup but no punchline.”
The movie can’t even decide what kind of slasher it wants to be. Is this a straight horror film? A horror-comedy? Some critics refer to it as a “slasher comedy fail,” noting that whatever humor it’s reaching for never really lands. The tone wobbles between half-hearted quips and lethargic stalking scenes, without committing to either legit suspense or actual camp. The result is like watching someone tell a joke they don’t fully understand, then explain it for 80 minutes.
Visually, it’s aggressively fine. The whole thing looks like exactly what it is: a microbudget Canadian B-movie shot in a real amusement arcade over eight days. You get the usual neon-splashed, blacklit spaces, some competent practical gore, and the occasional nice composition. But there’s no creativity in how kills are staged or how the space is used. A killer who can teleport and manipulate lights inside an arcade could be a playground of weird kills. Instead, it’s mostly standard stabbings with a side of “now we’re in the laser tag room.”
The characters, meanwhile, are pure body count. Alex is likable enough, but everyone else feels like a name tag stapled to a horror trope. Several reviewers singled out the cardboard characterization and dreadful dialogue as a major issue, and it’s hard to argue when you hear yet another round of “Guys, this isn’t funny anymore!” while someone bleeds out next to a claw machine. It doesn’t help that the movie wraps everything in a dull interrogation framing device with two detectives listening to final girl Rebecca recount the massacre… then refusing to believe her and leaving her locked up, just so we can get a sequel hook.
Ah yes, the sequel. Because of course there’s a sequel in the works: The Mouse Trap: Welcome to the Mickeyverse, which sounds less like a film and more like a cry for help from exhausted IP lawyers. That post-credits stinger—Mickey showing up at the police station to free Rebecca, promising to introduce her to “some people”—isn’t ominous so much as it is the cinematic equivalent of a “Smash that Like and Subscribe” button.
Critics have not exactly been kind. The Guardian gave it 1/5, calling it a “parasitic out-of-copyright grave-robber” with a “convoluted, sloppy” story. Another reviewer compared it unfavorably to Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey—and when you’re losing a quality contest to that movie, it’s time to re-evaluate your life choices. A family-oriented site bluntly labeled it an “atrocious Mickey Mouse slasher,” which, in fairness, is truth in advertising.
Audience reception hasn’t exactly rescued it either: the IMDb rating hovers in the low 2s, and user aggregators sit firmly in the “we’ve seen worse, but not many” zone. At the box office, it grossed just over $100k on a reported $800k budget—not catastrophic, but hardly the pop-culture event the team clearly hoped their public-domain stunt would become.
The most annoying part is that the movie never does anything meaningful with the public-domain angle. There’s no real satire of Disney, no commentary on childhood nostalgia being weaponized, nothing beyond “hey, you recognize this silhouette, right?” As one trade review noted, there’s “no attempt to parody or even reference anything else in the Mouse House universe,” making the film feel less like a daring IP jailbreak and more like a vaguely mouse-shaped cash grab.
To be clear, this isn’t unwatchable in the “turn it off immediately” sense. It’s just deeply, stubbornly mediocre—a novelty concept stretched thin across a very ordinary slasher. If you catch it free on streaming, it’s fine as background noise while you scroll your phone and occasionally look up to see someone get murdered with mild enthusiasm under fluorescent lighting.
But for a movie that sold itself on the audacity of turning Steamboat Willie into a supernatural killer, The Mouse Trap is shockingly toothless. It’s not scary, not particularly funny, and not nearly weird enough to justify its own existence. The most horrific thing about it might be the realization that this is probably just the first wave of public-domain mascot slashers shambling toward us.
If this is the shape of things to come, maybe Disney had a point keeping the mouse locked up.
