It's Alex's 21st Birthday, but she's stuck at the amusement arcade on a late shift so her friends decide to surprise her, but a masked killer dressed as Mickey Mouse decides to play a game of his o...
So I was finally going to stop delaying the inevitable and review “Blood and Honey 2”…..but y’all are gonna have to hold out just a tiny bit longer because “Mickey’s Mousetrap” just stuck its big-ass ears out in my direction and since I’m apparently glutton for punishment, I got to enter the clubhouse.
And as usual…..I really wish I hadn’t.
Let’s not mince any words here: Jamie Bailey did a horrible job directing this. Inauthentic at best and unfocused at worst, nothing feels planned out or manufactured with slightest hint of care or precision. The way I criticized Jeff Wadlow’s directing for being too boxed in and restrictive, I might need to take that back because this is just a geyser of inexperience bursting open from literally the first scene onward.
Technically speaking…..I really want to say it’s fine. There is actual technical effort displayed here beyond the slapdash point-and-shoot style so many lower-level films like this usually settle for but most of them are either too minuscule to make an impact or chip away at the films already banal attempt at a presentation. Sure, the sets are decent to look at but the production design itself is somehow more barren and inconsequential than the other worst films I’ve seen this year, ripped barren of any lurid imagery or ingenuity and even its overall aesthetic has nothing resembling any atmosphere, aura or tension.
Everything about the cinematography and editing is about as basic as you can imagine: there’s a nice variety of different angles and lens framing….and at least, you can see what’s happening. They’re the only two consistently decent things to stand out in this project and even they’re not worth discussing for longer than a couple seconds. Pacing is not so much erratic than it is truncated and slow for a movie this short, the ill-fated attempts at comedy are the very definition of second-hand embarrassment, costumes don’t stand out much, sound design borders on annoying and as expected, the musical score let me down again. I will personally book a flight over to your house and give you a kiss if you could name one music track here out of the rest that stands out because….yeah, not much luck on that front.
Hell, nobody was bothered enough to try and give this supposed “slasher” some half-decent kills. Even Blood & Honey succeeded on that front with better use of CG AND practical and special effects.
Acting is subpar with the exception of Sophie McIntosh, our main lead. She’s the only one who acts like a halfway decent human but even she can’t escape the world of barely defined characters and unnatural dialogue. And based on how certain scenes were shot, I wouldn’t be surprised if most of the dialogue had to be dubbed over due either the low budget or some potential behind the scenes tampering.
Yet another IP whose lease had expired and entered the public domain recently, this movie wasted no time reminding you of such and cheekily, or trying to cheekily get as much mileage out of its own exploitation as it can. It’s literally the equivalent of a 13 year old typing FIRST when a new video pops up because name recognition is all that matters, right? There’s shooting yourself in the foot and then there’s blowing your freakin’ legs off.
By now, I’d dive headfirst into picking apart this movies plot structure but what exactly do you want me to say? There’s literally no narrative to speak of or dissect in the manner I usually do: it’s just a bunch of adolescent horny drunks dicking around the arcade for the entire runtime checking off every stereotypical horror cliche in the book while a homeless Mickey Mouse fanatic who TELEPORTS boringly picks them off in the name of the hunt and that really is as specific as I can get about the plot. They do try to spice it up by intertwining an police interrogation with one of the survivors in-between the rampage but it only brings up more questions and continuity problems that only exacerbates its dreadful pacing and keep in mind, the movie is only an hour and 20 minutes long. It has the mother of all anti-climatic final acts, deliberately not tying up any loose ends while going half the time of the first two “acts” and yet feeling three times as long. Scatterbrained doesn’t even begin to describe how infuriatingly droll everything is played out.
Straddling the line between boring me to tears and pissing me off, the biggest crime this “narrative” commits is how little it hides its own sloth and apathy for the basics of film structure. It can’t even be bothered to adhere to the “And then” type of storytelling in a formal capacity: we’re just stuck with a mirage of images where things just happen and everything presented here has next to no meat on its bones to justify everything NOT imploding on itself.
It’s as if their entire thought process started and ended with “Take the Mickey Mouse persona, put him in a slasher environment and make up the rest as we go along. We’re not going to make a story about him, or integrate his lore to mirror the characters or even address him by his name. Just cobble together something half-baked to throw it out there and just hope somebody sees.” Look, as bad as the Winnie the Pooh slasher is, there’s some novelty in how blatant its WTF weirdness was. At least it attempted to take their IP and mold it into a watchable enough backstory and premise that’d actually fit the horror trappings it wanted despite it not leaning heavily into its absurdity.
Literally, nothing is done here. I apologize for regurgitating the same points a million different times but this film is literally about nothing. And I can’t write about NOTHING if it won’t bother to give me something.
Just flaming hot garbage all around. It has absolutely no respect for your time, your entertainment or your dignity, yet it feels entitled to over 80 minutes worth of your time. As gaming YouTube channel Rerez would say: ITS JUST BAD.
