Another public domain slasher disaster.If you’re shocked and appalled by the notion of a slasher movie headlined by a Mickey Mouse lookalike, you must have missed Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey (parts 1 and 2), The Mean One, and Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare. We’re living through a flood of rushed-to-the-screen horror made possible by the public domain, parody law, and the fluke success of Rhys Frake-Waterfield’s buzzworthy “Poohniverse” (a.k.a. Twisted Childhood Universe), and it’s finally come for Walt Disney’s most famous creation. Unfortunately, director Alejandro G. Alegre’s I Heart Willie has less to offer than some of the blunders mentioned above: Its reimagining of Mickey’s Steamboat Willie persona (the first version of the character to lose its copyright protection) is overthought, undercooked, and not in the business of payoffs. It’s an exploitation of our familiarity with Mickey Mouse and little else.
William “Willie” Cross (David Vaughn, who also wrote and produced I Heart Willie) is a deformed German man rumored to be half mouse, half human, and the supposed inspiration for Disney’s pioneering effort in sound cartoons. He’s your typical slasher villain with a tragic history – a local legend with a habit of skinning trespassers – distinguished by the fact that he dresses like a paddle-steamer-piloting rodent. When a quartet of ghost hunting vloggers chooses Willie’s turf for their next episode, I Heart Willie flimsily sets up cheap flesh-flaying thrills that never stray far from convention.
Vaughn’s story mixes up a confusing cocktail of Natural Born Killers and Nosferatu, garnished with Hostel-style mutilation. Once paranormal investigator Nora (Maya Luna) confesses that she has a romantic connection with Willie, it’s clear that her colleagues are done for. She’s pulled toward Willie like an obsessed fan; they’re bonded by a past encounter, but this shared backstory lacks the clarity that’d smooth over the bumpiness with which it’s revealed. Similarly unpolished: Willie is a mouse boy who doesn’t look all that mousey. Aside from his milky eyes, it’s the gruesome burn scars that define the character’s design. His affinity for Steamboat Willie and cut-rate cosplay – black leg paint, ugly gloves, grimy white shorts, and flimsy mask – link I Heart Willie with its animated inspiration, but they’re hardly the makings of a murderous romantic lead.
This is a shambling production: The lighting levels are inconsistently balanced, causing twitchy auto-focus adjustments while the cast drone on and on. The editing is reckless and abrupt, cutting awkwardly away from the violent onscreen action and plowing any momentum I Heart Willie might have into a brick wall. The sound occasionally bottoms out, and the hum of background static sometimes downs out the dialogue.
I Heart Willie GalleryWhereas Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey 2 strives to fulfill its audience’s expectations for extreme kills and memorable grossness, Alegre can only push so far. While we see Willie scalping his victims and carving away bits of their flesh, anything beyond that happens off-camera. A dismemberment, a joint stabbing, and other heinous acts are portrayed only through sound design and the spurts of blood that make Willie’s getup black and white and red all over.
I Heart Willie masquerades as a traumatizing tale of fated lovers, but remove its mask and you’ll find no real personality beneath. This is neither the first nor the last horror movie to be inspired by Steamboat Willie, but it doesn’t do much to stand out from competition that includes David Howard Thorton trading Art the Clown’s tiny little hat for a pair of mouse ears aboard the decommissioned ferry owned by Colin Jost and Pete Davidson. (Now that’s an unexpected combination of recognizable pop-culture icons.) Instead, I Heart Willie fades into the background, unable to do anything more than scribble some blood and guts in the margins of Disney’s blueprint.
VerdictI Heart Willie is a public domain slasher with little to offer beyond its absurd reimagining of the animated short that introduced Mickey and Minnie Mouse to the world. The fun of dropping their love story into a horror movie is lost to an amateur execution that wastes a few morsels of gooey gore. It takes all the wrong lessons from Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey and its successors/imitators, believing “Mickey Gone Mad” is enough.
In This ArticleNot yet available for streaming.
I Heart Willie Reviewawful
I Heart Willie is an overcomplicated, underdelivered, and all-around disappointing public domain slasher that can’t even get rudimentary filmmaking techniques right.
Matt Donato
