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Movie of the Day: Screamboat
Last night I finally got around to watching Screamboat. Of the Steamboat Willie horror movies I’ve seen (I think this is the fifth one I’ve watched over the past twelve months), Screamboat ranks towards the top. It’s not my favorite of the bunch, but for an intentionally dumb public-domain-inspired horror parody, it’s pretty good.
Screamboat takes place on the Staten Island Ferry as it travels across the New York Harbor during the late night/early morning hours. Selena, a bartender with big dreams and an even bigger disenchantment with New York City, is the designated final girl of the story. When we meet her, she’s trying to avoid spending the entire ferry ride with five women celebrating a birthday (and dressed vaguely like Disney princesses) who followed her from the bar she works at. Selena just wants a quiet ride, but a genetically altered mouse with murder in his heart makes sure that nobody aboard the ferry has a peaceful time. Gory murders ensue.
The movie plays out pretty much as I suspected it might. Willie, the mouse, spends the movie killing people in gory ways while Selena and a few other survivors try to find a way to stay alive and fight back. It’s a standard slasher scenario, which I’m totally cool with. I enjoyed the inventiveness of most of the kills, and I really dug the excessive blood that accompanies those kills. Also, bonus points for using practical gore effects in many scenes. As a silly, bloody slasher movie, Screamboat delivers.
The story is fine. It does its job, which is to produce a series of scenarios that allows for an anthropomorphic mouse to murder people. It’s not a particularly imaginative story, but it gets the job done. Screamboat is a horror-comedy though, and most of the humor isn’t for me. I like silliness, but this brand of silliness just didn’t do it for me. So in that sense, I didn’t really care for the writing. I’m just here for the slaughter.
The bigger issue for me though, is that I don’t feel like David Howard Thornton’s talents as a character actor were fully utilized. David plays Willie, but since Willie is a short creature and David is a tall man, he can never directly interact with anyone on-screen without the aid of special effects. In my estimation, one of David’s biggest strengths is how well he interacts with other people, especially when the character he’s playing doesn’t speak (like, say, Art the Clown). He doesn’t get the chance to show off those skills in Screamboat, and that hurts the movie for me. Of course it can’t be helped because of the nature (or rather, that stature) of the character. But Willie always felt like he was off somewhere on his own, even when he was in scenes with people. The danger never felt immediate. Plus, David was completely covered in heavy costuming and appliances, which further obstructed his ability to emote. I enjoyed the Willie character, but I felt like I should have loved him.
Star Rating: 3 out of 5
Despite the negatives, I still had fun with Screamboat. I don’t think most general audiences will get the same enjoyment I did, but low-budget horror fans who also enjoy comedy and gore might get a kick out of it. Screamboat is currently streaming on Peacock.
In the News
- Chad and Carey Hayes, the writers of The Conjuring (2013) and co-writers of The Conjuring 2 (2016), will make their directing debut with the upcoming film Train. No story details have been revealed, but the movie will star Frances O’Connor (The Conjuring 2). (Variety)
- Paul Walter Hauser will reportedly be cast in Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil reboot. (Variety)
- Christopher Landon (Freaky, Happy Death Day) will direct the thriller Blink of an Eye from writers Chris Roach and Jillian Jacobs. The trio previously worked together on Drop (2025). The film has already been picked up by Netflix. (Variety)
- Bring Her Back will begin streaming on HBO Max on October 3rd. (Deadline)
- Pig Hill, an upcoming horror movie starring Rainey Qualley, has been picked up by Cineverse for distribution on Screambox. The movie is about a series of mysterious disappearances of women in a small town that might be linked to local folklore. No release date has been announced. (Deadline)
- More new trailers released yesterday:
Birthdays
Jada Pinkett Smith was born on September 18th, 1971. She memorably appeared in the opening scene of Scream 2 (1997) as an unfortunate moviegoer who becomes the target of Ghostface while watching Stab in a packed theater. Her best horror role, however, is a Jeryline in Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight (1995). I’m still holding onto hope that we’ll get a legacy sequel that follows Jeryline in the decades after she became a Demon Knight.
Also celebrating a birthday today is James Marsden. Born on September 18th, 1973, James starred in Disturbing Behavior (1998), and the year prior he was in a low-budget horror anthology film titled Campfire Tales (1997). He also played Stu Redman in the TV miniseries The Stand (2021-2022).
Events on This Day
Hellraiser was released in North America on September 18th, 1987. The movie was originally given an X rating in the United States. To get the movie down to an R for release, Clive Barker said he had to “take some spanking out of the flashback scenes and shorten some of the violence.” With an R-rating achieved, Hellraiser made $14.5 million in North America.
Jennifer’s Body was released on September 18th, 2009. Though the film didn’t fare well with critics or general audiences when it was first released, it has re-emerged as a cult classic in recent years. Writer Diablo Cody and director Karyn Kusama made the movie to specifically appeal to teenage girls, but they felt the marketing done by the studio hurt the film before anyone had even seen it. In an article published by IndieWire in 2018, Cody said, “Because of the way the film was marketed, people wanted to see the movie as a cheap, trashy, exploitative vehicle for the hot girl from Transformers. That’s how people insisted on seeing the film, even though I think when you watch it, it’s pretty obvious that there’s something else going on.”
The Haunting was released in the United States on September 18th, 1963. The film is a largely faithful adaptation of The Haunting of Hill House novel written by Shirley Jackson. When Ted Turner began his controversial campaign in the 1980s to colorize classic black and white films, The Haunting was on his list of potential candidates. Robert Wise, the director of The Haunting, was able to prevent Turner’s colorization by citing a clause in his original contract stating that the film had to be in black and white. The Haunting was made during a time when the film industry was transitioning from black and white to color, so the clause was likely written to explicitly state Wise’s creative decisions about the production.
