2025 | unrated (R equivalent) | starring David Howard Thornton, Kailey Hyman, Allison Pittel | directed by Steven LaMorte | 1 hr 42 mins | 1 out of 5 stars |
One night on the last scheduled trip of the Staten Island Ferry a group of party girls, commuters and dockworkers are stalked by a small rat named Steamboat Willie (David Howard Thornton) acting out a curse 90 years in the making.
The dreaded 1-star, a rating I didn’t even give to the unintentionally funny Citizen Vigilante. While it’s often reserved for a movie I hated, are creatively bankrupt or found offensive in some way, it also applies to movies that are barely movies. That don’t have the tiniest bit of immersion, that are such a zero-budget back-yard production that you can see all the strings, all the edges and all the gum and duct tape holding it together. If the story and writing is good enough, this can be charming, but that is definitely not the case with Screamboat. I didn’t hate the movie, but I found that everything I liked about it was all theme and theory and not actually on the screen.
Stepping back from a thousand-foot perspective and looking at the trend of indie filmmakers turning childhood stories that have fallen into the public domain and turning them into cheap cash-grab horror movies, the approach taken by Screamboat is exactly what I would want to see in a movie like this. It’s got a meta quality to it, featuring a creature that has been dormant for 90 years/the length of the Walt Disney copyright and is now unleashed onto the world with a vengeance. It turns the original Steamboat into the perennial joke of the Staten Island Ferry, and its villainous mouse is actual mouse-size and not a human sized villain dressed up in a mouse costume (a la Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey). It’s also crammed with references to other movies and features a cast of party girls dressed up like different Disney princesses. All clever ideas and all the kind of ideas lacking in the Twisted Childhood Universe movies (so far). It’s a reason to believe this movie might actually be not bad while there is no chance of that happening with Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey.
So, points for the premise. The problem with all of it is the execution, as this movie very quickly takes everything potentially fun and clever about it and grinds it into the ground under a mismatched tone and an inability to realize the violence and mayhem it wants to create. First of all, it’s just not a horror movie. It’s not. Yes, there is some blood and kills in it, but all of it is played with the wacky delivery of an R-rated Looney Toons cartoon. People are stabbed, electrocuted and stabbed again and it’s played for comedy. There are no suspense sequences, there is no attempt at all to create an atmosphere of horror here at all. It is a straight up comedy about a rat killing people and it’s just not funny. Those aforementioned Disney references are wedged in there so forcefully that you can spot them from space. Character dialog takes a hard right turn from what they are saying into saying something like “I want to be where the people are” or “let it go”. They might as well turn to the camera and wink.
The other problem is how the movie is unable to bring 6-inch Steamboat Willie to life in any convincing way. Willie is almost always shot in close-up against a green screen. His kills are equally close-up or mid shots of characters reacting to him. Future horror filmmakers take note: it’s a real problem when you’re villain and your other characters can’t share the same frame together. It’s a real problem. It separates the threat entirely and turns the movie into a patchwork of stitching together images that we have to do the work to connect in our brains. As Mike Stokalsa would say, “You didn’t notice it, but your brain did.”
The other thing that should work in this movie, but doesn’t because of that patchwork construction, is the Terrifier 2 reunion that’s going on here David Howard Thornton and Kailey Hyman. Hyman, despite not even being billed in the end credits and hidden from publicity material, is the best thing in this movie just as she was a standout in T2. She completely gets the comedic tone here and her vein birthday girl performance and thick long island accent do what they can to milk this material for all it’s worth. Given how this movie is shot, it’s unlikely they even knew the other was in it, much less shared a day on set. Which brings me to Thornton, whose mime comic skills are now well know based on what he’s done with Art the Clown. Screamboat represents the laziest use of this talent. Get a horror movie name, shove him in a costume so big he can barely emote in it and assume he will make magic. It goes to show that Art is such a good character because of the collaboration between Thornton and Damian Leone, who provides Thornton the material, opportunity and emotive costuming to actually be creative with.
I just hope the check cleared for everyone involved.