The Mouse Trap | Film Review

 

Working the late shift at an amusement arcade, Alex (Sophie McIntosh) is surprised by her friends for her 21st birthday. But the night quickly goes downhill when a killer dressed as Mickey Mouse starts picking the friends off one by one.

Now I have to be completely honest, I went into this knowing that it would be bad. Sometimes I just really love watching bad horror movies, so I definitely didn't have high hopes.

So this was a weird situation in that the film wasn't good at all, but I did enjoy watching it. Even though my review is pretty much all negative, I did have a good time!

For a start, the characters are quite one-dimensional. None of them have real personalities and even the main characters we follow aren't particularly significant.

But more than this, the chemistry between this friend group was non-existent. Never has a group of 'friends' felt more like strangers. It was clear these people had never spent any significant time together and didn't really know each other at all. Which may be a fault of the acting, the casting or the writing.

Speaking of the writing, this was a basic slasher and so the writing itself wasn't too bad. However, the dialogue specifically isn't realistic and makes the characters seem quite inauthentic.

There were a lot of plot holes and things that didn't add up, and the characters made a lot of bad decisions just for the purpose of moving the plot forward.

The second most disappointing thing about it for me was the actual kills. Not only were they quite unoriginal, but they all happened really quickly, which wasn't fun to watch. Having some really original, fun kills would have been really interesting, even if the rest of the film didn't work.

But then there was the most disappointing thing - the ending.

Even if I didn't like the rest of the film, I was intrigued, I was engaged, and I really wanted to see what was going to happen next.

And then the ending happened and knocked 2 stars off of the rating I was going to give it. It was one of the worst endings to a movie I've ever seen - especially because the film seemed to be leading to some kind of plot twist and then just stopped. It was so bad!

So overall, this was a fun, bad movie that kept me engaged even if nothing about it really worked. If not for the ending, it might have been a 'so bad it's good' movie, but the ending was so bad that I could never really recommend it to anyone!

2/10