If you’ve been following the world of horror entertainment, you’re aware  there’s been a rise of films that take intellectual property recently deposited into the public domain as their source material. There was, for instance, a “Winnie the Pooh as a monster” film recently, and also something involving Popeye. 

I was not aware that Mickey Mouse had gotten the same treatment. (I’m a little unclear on the legalities, but I think the version of Mickey as seen in the short film “Steamboat Willie” is now in the public domain, doubtless to the chagrin of Disney.)

So how does it all get tied into a horror movie plot? A group of college-age kids celebrate a friend‘s birthday party by renting out the video game and entertainment parlor in which she works. (It’s like a Chuck E. Cheese, if you’re familiar with that brand.) Unfortunately for them, a killer dons a Mickey Mouse mask and starts slashing away at their young, nubile flesh. And that killer may, in fact, have some kind of supernatural traits, particularly the ability to teleport.

I say may have because the whole story is being narrated to us by a girl in a jail lockup after the murders, and we get that whole “The Usual Suspects” vibe—the unreliable narrator.

About 20 minutes into this movie, I suspected it was just gonna be a giant pile of crap. But, you know what? There were actually some pretty decent jokes and the main characters were not complete idiots. You got invested in their attempts to survive.

The acting was decent, but there were some weird edits, where spoken lines kind of hung in the air. There was at least one dialogue flub they should have reshot.

“The Mouse Trap” does have an ending that I imagine will frustrate a lot of people. I advise you stay tuned past the end credits because there’s a minor epilogue that doesn’t really clear anything up, but gets the brain buzzing with some possibilities.

It’s a Canadian film, and you’ll hear a bit of that Canuck accent on words like “about.”

Best line: “Stop playing this one by the books. It’s not going to be that kind of night.”