Steven LaMorte’s Screamboat is a film that asks: what if Mickey Mouse had unresolved trauma, a vendetta against humanity, and a penchant for stabbing people in the neck with nautical instruments? The answer is a 72-minute fever dream of ferry rides, birthday parties, and a rodent who’s traded whistling for murder. It’s a horror-comedy that doesn’t so much parody Steamboat Willie as it drags it into a sewer, gives it rabies, and sets it loose on Staten Island commuters.
David Howard Thornton, fresh off his turn as Art the Clown, plays Steamboat Willie with the kind of manic glee that suggests he’s been locked in a basement watching old Disney shorts on loop while sharpening cheese knives. His performance is the film’s engine: twitchy, gleeful, and deeply committed to the bit. He doesn’t speak, but he squeaks, skitters, and slaughters with the precision of a creature who once knew joy and now only knows vengeance. The backstory—he was once pure until humanity’s neglect turned him homicidal—is delivered with the gravity of a Greek tragedy, except the chorus is drunk and wearing mouse ears.
The plot is a loose collection of setups for carnage. Two shipyard workers meet their fate early, one falling into a hole that may or may not be metaphorical. Then we board the ferry, where a birthday party full of loud, intoxicated revelers becomes the perfect buffet for Willie’s wrath. Selena (Allison Pittel) tries to dodge the chaos by pawning off her shift, but fate and the mouse have other plans. Jesse Posey’s Pete is the kind of guy who probably deserves to be chased by a cartoon demon, and Amy Schumacher’s EMT Amber delivers lines with the weary cadence of someone who’s seen too many ferry-related fatalities.
The title Screamboat earns its place. The boat screams. The passengers scream. The mouse screams, though mostly in squeaks. There’s a moment where the ferry itself seems to groan under the weight of its own absurdity, as if it knows it’s part of a film that’s trying to be both Fantasia and Friday the 13th. It’s not subtle. It doesn’t want to be. It wants to stab you with a tiny anchor and then dance on your corpse.
As a Mickey Mouse parody, it’s more conceptual than literal. There are nods—Willie’s outfit, the whistling motif, the black-and-white hallucinations—but the film is less interested in satire than in desecration. It’s a love letter written in blood and glitter. As a slasher, it’s gleefully uneven. Some kills are inventive, others feel like filler. The pacing stumbles, especially in the middle third, where the ferry becomes a maze of screaming extras and underlit corridors. But when it hits, it hits hard. There’s a kill involving a birthday cake that deserves its own short film.
The absurdity is the point. LaMorte isn’t trying to make sense—he’s trying to make noise. The film is loud, messy, and occasionally brilliant. It’s also lonely. Beneath the chaos is a story about a creature abandoned by the world, lashing out in the only way it knows how. The passengers are caricatures, but Willie is a tragedy. He was kind once. Now he’s a monster. And the ferry keeps moving.
Grade:+ B. Streaming on Peacock.
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