UK. 2025.
Crew
Director – Brendan Petrizzo, Screenplay – Harry Boxley & Marc Gottlieb, Producers – Anthony C. Ferrante & Brendan Petrizzo, Photography – Charlie Steeds, Music – James Cox, Special Effects – Jess Martin, Makeup – Jade Elton. Production Company – ITN Studios.
Cast
Natasha Tosini (Chloe), Lewis Santer (The Killer), Chris Lines (Dr. Rupert Mouse), Allie Moreno (Kim), Stephen Staley (The Bear), Thomas Murphy (Michael), Nichaela Farrell (Brandy), Erin Sanderson (Meg), Rosie Edwards (Lucy), Harry Gilubileo (Charlie), Jake Watkins (Jake), Danielle Scott (Taylor), Eve Vice (Dana), Tessa Wood (Janet), Misti Taylor (Molly), Johnny Vivash (Paul Chamberland)
Plot
Chloe is about to depart England for studies in Los Angeles. She and her friends gather to celebrate before she leaves. As they enter Knightly’s Fun Park, they are stalked by a figure with a mouse face, along with his companion The Bear, who brutally kill various of the group. The mouse and its companion have been created as human-animal hybrids by Dr Rupert Mouse, a scientist who has a laboratory at the amusement park. Rupert encourages the two to bring victims back so that he can build each of them a bride out of their body parts.
Quite a sensation was created with Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey (2023) where producer Scott Chambers and associates took a beloved children’s character that had just entered public domain and delivered a brutal and nasty horror version. The film was a surprising success and has seen Chambers and other filmmakers making a host of other horror versions of children’s stories, characters and fairytales with the likes of assorted horror versions of Cinderella and Popeye, Mary Had a Little Lamb (2023), Three Blind Mice (2023), Goldilocks and the Three Bears: Death & Porridge (2024), Bambi: The Reckoning (2025), Fairest of Them All (2025), Hook (2025), Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare (2025), Piglet (2025), Rumpelstiltskin (2025) and Pinocchio: Unstrung (2026), among others. Mouse of Horrors comes from ITN Studios who have been behind quite a few of these, including the Winnie-the-Pooh films.
On January 1, 2024, the first Mickey Mouse cartoon Steamboat Willie (1928) came into public domain in the US. This saw a host of filmmakers leap on board and offer Mickey Mouse horrors that have so far included the likes of The Mouse Trap (2024), I Heart Willie (2025), Mouseboat Massacre (2025) and Screamboat (2025). I assumed that Mouse of Horrors would be another such entry but it is not clear if it is – it features a human-animal hybrid with a mouse-like face going around killing people but there is nothing that directly ties this to Mickey Mouse or Steamboat Willie so the question is left open. One oddity is that the film does seem to be aiming to exist in the same universe as the Winnie-the-Pooh films as there is a second animal hybrid character known only as The Bear who you would swear is reusing the same costume as Chambers’ Winnie-the-Pooh. ITN has promised to bring their characters together in the announced Poohniverse Assemble.
The film is an odd cross-current of talent. Brandon Patrizzo is an American director who has made films like Monster Hunters (2020), Devil’s Triangle (2021) and Megalodon: The Frenzy (2023) for The Asylum. The film was shot in England and a number of the cast have had parts in the films of Scott Chambers. Harry Boxley has written a number of scripts for Chambers’ films and those of others, while co-writer Marc Gottlieb is a regular writer for The Asylum and director of the Ape vs Mecha Ape films. The film is produced by Anthony C. Ferrante, a US director best known for Sharknado (2013) and sequels for The Asylum. The film is also photographed by Charlie Steeds, a British horror director in his own right.
Mouse of Horrors goes for the gore-drenched and sadistically nasty. We see the barman character gets his tongue pulled out and cut off. A guy’s face is fried on the dodgem tracks and a girl has arms severed in one of the bumper cars. Tessa Wood has two darts thrown by the mouse and impaled in her cheeks. The nastiest of these is where Nichaela Farrell is pinned down and eviscerated and then each of her eyeballs is plucked and gleefully devoured by the mouse while she is still alive.
There is not much plot holding Mouse of Horrors together, just a series of kills around a single location (the existing locale of Knightly’s Fun Park in Wales). The character called Professor Rupert is a Frankenstein figure who nominally tells his two creations to capture some girls so that he can build a bride, although they spend most of the film torturing and killing them nastily. Certainly, in the mime work by Lewis Santer, who had previously played Tigger in Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey II (2024), the character of the mouse, known on screen as just The Killer, is quite a sinister and malevolent creation.
Trailer here