The public domain of childhood characters turning into horror characters seemed fun at first but it seems to quickly be showing itself as a mess and Screamboat is a fine example of that. Using the Steamboat Willie character name from Disney, we see a demented mouse slaughter people on a NYC ferry.
Willie here, played by (Terrifier franchise’s David Howard Thornton), was once a loving mouse with a human friend and mouse partner, but after neglect from the world hit him and he lost his loved ones he stayed on the ferry stewing in hatred of people.
While the film does take place on a real ferry at least, it truly shows its limited budget here. The acting and dialog is often stiff and emotionless, CGI backgrounds, and poorly lit or overly lit moments here just scream low budget. For instance in one scene, we go from a bigger moment where its dark outside in pure black to seconds later in the same scene being bright sunlight.
The big talk here will be Willie himself. At mouse size its hard to get him into scenes really and the budget can’t help that. So instead we are treated to him and our boat of victims never really being on screen together. We get cuts that attempt to show him in a smaller size before cutting back to a human. In some scenes hes clearly just a stuffed animal as well. The gore itself is clearly where the budget went as a few scenes have a lot of blood and fun decent enough gore while others have horribly cheap looking effects.
What becomes one of the major issues though is the film is just boring. Even at a brisk 90 minutes it could have used so much cut from it. The dialog and characters are all so unlikable that you just can’t wait for them to be killed and even when they do, its rarely satisfying. When it comes to horror being so bad its good or just so bad, Screamboat falls into the so bad section.
Score :
1 / 5
