Rushing to catch a late night crossing, a disparate group of people board the boat, from sleepy drunks to mothers and kids keen to get home; occupants also include lonesome down on her luck designer Selena (Allison Pittel) and a rowdy group of social media obsessed party girls, out to celebrate the birthday of one of their own.
But there's another less visible occupant of the vessel; a discarded stowaway who wakes from a decades long slumber, his rest disrupted by a ferry maintenance team who become the first victims of an orgy of death; it's Steamboat Willie (David Howard Thornton), a pint size mutated mouse with a very familiar laugh! For Screamboat, if you've not guessed yet, is a sort of reboot of the famous 1928 animated short of the same name, which launched the 'career' of Mickey Mouse.
In order for Willie to carry out his campaign of violence it's essential that the boat be isolated, which LaMorte achieves via a tried and tested disaster movie plot device; the ferry, detained in port because of tricky weather conditions which have cancelled all other services, is ill advisedly given permission to set off due to a combination of an impatient and overtime fatigued captain and a benevolent service operator.
Not done with the disaster movie cliches, grumpy Selena gets a sort of meet cute with ferry employee Pete (Jesse Posey), and practical EMT staffer Amber (Amy Schumacher) is onhand as the slightly older character with medical expertise who keeps a clear head when all around is mayhem; and she's in for a busy night, as is Selena, to whom Willie shows an immediate attachment, his first glimpse of the girl haloed in an imagined ring of human hearts.
LaMorte takes a little time to offer some wider societal observations as well. As the danger rises, and despite the boat's passengers being a real New York mix of ethnicities and genders, the most espoused view about the reasons behind the mayhem seems to be 'terrorists'. The Statue of Liberty comes in for a bit of a bashing too, One of the ferry passengers, presumably returning from a costume party dressed as Lady Liberty, leaves the head of the ensemble lying discarded on the floor. And in another scene, as the ferry passes the Statue, the view is obscured by a passing boat piled high with trash.
But the star of the show is Willie himself. His backstory, involving uncle Walt and peddling the myth about the supposed disaffection between creator and created, is beautifully delivered via some fine animation work from Christian Cordella and Tahnee Gehm.
Screamboat's shtick is that Willie (who cannot be named as M*ckey for similar copyright reasons as LaMorte encountered in being unable to title the creature of his previous fright flick, The Mean One, as the Gr*nch) may only be waist high, but has all the manic, creatively deadly energy of the Terrifier franchise's Art the Clown, Thornton's previous and arguably most famous role. Personally I found the violence in those movies just a little too over the top (and yes, I'm aware that was the intention), but here Willie's acts of mayhem feel like the more elegant set pieces of 1980s slice 'n' dice movies, complete with superb practical effects (they're also in the spirit of the original shenanigans in Steamboat Willie). Announcing his arrival by whistling 'Steamboat Bill' (from the original short film, but here taking on a more creepy aspect), there's even a scene, recreated from the animated short, where little Willie takes the vessel's helm, but here he's only able to reach it by standing on the body of one of his victims.
The hurried appropriation of newly-in-the-public-domain fictional characters for horror movie subject matter has, admittedly, been a bit of a bumpy road (the 'Steamboat Willie' character entered the public domain on January 1, 2024, just one day before work started on Screamboat) but whereas previous adaptations (Winnie the Pooh, I'm looking at you) have failed through a combination of a lack of budget and, frankly, directorial talent, Screamboat succeeds because it's fast, furious and situationally very funny. As one of the characters in the movie comments, "everything gets recycled", but when it's done this well, all is forgiven.
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