Prime Time: The Mouse Trap (2024)

I've been around a bit. Which means I'm old, but also means that I have learned many lessons. Most of those lessons are visible in my online writing. I used to try and tag movie titles all over social media, whether the review was good or bad. Then I discovered that was a bad thing, particularly when the review is bad and the film-makers see it appearing in places they may not want to see it. I used to be a bit more free and easy with my insults, although I am pretty sure that I still did my best to avoid getting personal. And I used to live in a world in which many of the horror movies looking to make a quick payday seemed just a bit less cynical.

The Mouse Trap is another of those recent movies that is cashing in on an expired copyright (this particular one belonging to "Steamboat Willie"). It's written by Simon Phillips, an actor and writer involved in some very poor genre movies throughout the past two decades. It's directed by Jamie Bailey. The last thing I saw from this duo was Deinfluencer, a film so bad that it makes The Mouse Trap seem wonderful in comparison. And The Mouse Trap is decidedly not wonderful.

There's a wraparound that shows two detectives interviewing a young woman (Rebecca, played by Mackenzie Mills) who has just survived a massacre at an amusement arcade. The killer was wearing a very familiar mask, and may have the power of teleportation. This makes it much easier for him to carve his way through everyone who has turned up after hours to celebrate the birthday of Alex (Sophie McIntosh). Simple, eh. So you should expect a cheap film that keeps a focus on gratuitous violence, and maybe also some gratuitous nudity. That's not what you get though. 

There's an amusing opening scroll that allows the film-makers to acknowledge their cheek at (mis)using something simply based on the availability of it, but that's the only thing here that is worth your time. I don't want to be overly harsh on the cast members, despite nobody being all that good, so I'll just say that nobody manages to deliver a character with any depth, or worth caring about in the slightest. A large part of that is to do with the writing, of course, but Mills, McIntosh, Madeline Kelman, Ben Harris, Callum Sywyk, Mireille Gagné, James Laurin, and Kayleigh Styles are only being mentioned here because I can check the cast list online. I couldn't pick any of them out of a lineup if my life depended on it, and I only just finished watching the film.

I blame both Bailey and Phillips equally for this mess. At best, this could have been a silly bit of murder and mayhem. If there's no need for logic then there's no need to limit the creativity. Sadly, this is a tame and, worst of all, boring slasher movie that barely delivers enough bloodshed, let alone anything else that could have made it more entertaining. The 80-minute runtime feels much longer than that, and I guarantee that there are dozens of other cheap slasher movies that do a much better job without making use of some misappropriated iconography. 

Yes, I'll watch every other movie like this. I'm going to check out Screamboat, I'll eventually check out that second Winnie The Pooh horror, Popeye's Revenge, Peter Pan's Neverland Nightmare, and Bambi: The Reckoning too. I doubt I'll enjoy many (if any) of them. But I can now hope that they're at least more fun than this dull dreck.  

2/10

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Deinfluencer (2022)

A British chiller that also wants to comment on our relationships with social media, the scariest thing about Deinfluencer is the fact that there’s at least one sequel being prepped (although we can always hope that it doesn’t get to the full production stage).

A young woman named Kelly (Marie Luciani-Grimaldi) wakes up in an unknown location, distressed to find that she has been kidnapped by someone who intends to set her a number of challenges. All of those challenges will revolve around her getting certain numbers of likes on her Instagram posts, and all will also aim to teach Kelly a valuable lesson.

Directed by Jamie Bailey, who also worked on the script with actor Simon Phillips (onscreen as the masked kidnapper), Deinfluencer is childishly simple and clumsy in the way it handles the central idea. It’s obvious that someone figured out the end point and decided to retrofit the whole thing from there, and it’s equally obvious that everyone involved would have to compensate for the budgetary limitations with talent and creativity. They aren’t able to do so.

I tend to like seeing Phillips onscreen, a jobbing actor who has been plying his trade for quite a while now, but he’s sadly not often a sign of quality. His acting range feels quite limited, and his reputation feels seriously tarnished by his immersion in the UK film productions that aim for a business model of “keep costs low and turn a profit selling titles before people realise how bad they are”. He has starred in an average of 4 movies a year for the past few years, and I am willing to bet that very few of those, if any, manage to rise up to the level of average. Luciani-Grimaldi isn’t very good here either, although she has the excuse of just being at the start of her onscreen acting career. There are one or two others bulking up the tiny cast, but nobody acquits themselves well enough to warrant a namecheck here.

Every time I see another film like this, one that feels as if it has come off some production line for British movies made without care or passion, I get mad. I get mad at the fact I know I will still watch the damn thing to the end, I get mad at those involved not making enough effort, and I get mad for the people who have been unable to get their own films made while dross like this ends up out there, littering the cinematic landscape like full dog “poo bags” hanging from tree branches.

Maybe everyone went into this with the best intentions. Maybe this is genuinely the best end result they could have achieved. I strongly doubt it though, and I suspect both Bailey and Phillips know they could have done better. But that might have taken a bit more effort.

2/10

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