Review: "The Mouse Trap"
I still haven't watched the Winnie the Pooh Horror movies, and after this, I'm not sure if they can be any worse... or better, honestly.
Alex and Jayna are working at a terrible job, in a terrible arcade. One night, just before closing, their boss comes to them with a request to work a few extra hours for double the pay. Reluctant to stay any longer at work, the pair also realizes that they do really need to the pay and agree to supervise one last party for the evening. Apparently, it is a birthday party for a group of eight kids, and should be easy money. Just before the party is set to start Alex is cleaning up to try and assure that they will be able to leave on time. Jayna talks her into letting her leave to go see her boyfriend instead of staying. Alex lets her go but tells her that she will not cover for her if she gets caught.
While cleaning around the back exit, Alex finds who she thinks is her boss in a Steamboat Willie mask chaining the back door. Alex runs back to the front of the store and literally stumbles into her friends Marcus, Paul, Jackie, Gemma, Danny, Marie, Ryan, and Rebecca. Confused about how they all got there and WHY, they quickly inform her that the birthday party is for her. Granted, the party is two weeks early, but as her friend Marcus says, if it were on her birthday, it might not have been as much of a surprise. After all, the kids, who have been friends since elementary school, have been having their birthday parties at Funhaven for as long as they can remember.
Let the party begin. The entire group starts playing the random games around the arcade, having more than a few drinks, and just generally enjoying the freedom of the entire place to themselves. They all agree that this is a "phone-free" event and put all their phones in a bag. Two of the group, Paul and Jackie, decide to sneak off to have a little "personal time" together. Just before the real action begins, they notice a stocky guy in a hockey jersey and a mouse mask staring at them. When confronted, he lunges at them with a knife. The rest of the group begins to get bored and agree to just head to a bar for Alex to have her first drinks out. It's only then that they realize that the doors are all chained shut and that things are about to get much worse.
I have been a long-time fan of Disney. Maybe not the Disney movies, but the parks and all that goes along with them. Yes, I am an adult Disney person. I even watched and reviewed the insanely bizarre and guerrilla-filmed movie "Escape from Tomorrow" a while ago. The Mouse Trap, or Mickey's Mouse Trap, is bad. Like, I know it's meant as a "horror comedy," but it doesn't work as that either. There is zero reason this had to be a killer with a Mickey Mouse mask. It's only there because they could.
This feels more like a rip-off of Five Nights at Freddy's than a jab at Steamboat Willie. Though it is featured multiple times in the film. I have to believe that this started out as a film about some OTHER sort of masked killer, and then when Steamboat Willie went into the public domain, they just decided to slap a mask on the killer. Absolutely nothing about the killer itself or his motivations or "powers" has anything to do with the cartoon.
I honestly don't know what I was expecting from The Mouse Trap before I started the film, but this didn't hit on anything worthwhile. There's a whole chunk of the film dedicated to one of the victims making it out and talking to the cops that doesn't make any sense and has more holes in it than the movie holes. Apparently there is a possibility of a sequel, but this isn't worth your time, even if the second one turns out to be amazing. As I said, it certainly is a trap. Don't fall for it.
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