A few years ago, a film appeared that was more clickbait than narrative art. Pooh: Blood and Honey courted headline controversy in precisely the way it had always been intended to, as a violent slasher movie based on that beloved figure of children’s literature, Winnie-the-Pooh. It existed not so much because anybody wanted it, but because nobody could stop them from making it, with Pooh having entered the public domain.
But Pooh’s not alone in that respect, with a brace of new films clearly modelled directly on Blood and Honey appearing this month: Shiver Me Timbers, a slasher film about a killer Popeye; and I Heart Willie, a slasher about a killer Mickey Mouse.
Both pictures give their public domain mascots new backstories, but Mickey’s is the more interesting, in which the Mickey Mouse we recognise from “Steamboat Willie” (currently the only Mickey Mouse work to have entered public domain) was created by Walt Disney drawing inspiration from a real-life Mouse-Boy, supposedly burned up in a fire.
Shiver Me Timbers goes with the less interesting route of having Popeye be an initially ordinary sailor mutated by strange comets from space or something. The main purpose this serves is to give Shiver Me Timbers a flimsy excuse to cut frequently to screensaver-y shots of the night sky. It does this often, for Shiver Me Timbers is absolutely desperate to pad its script to feature length and employs all the usual tactics – excessively long and redundant establishing shots, a long and gratuitously “sexy” dance scene, always showing characters travelling from Point A to Point B, never utilising the language of editing to convey this. All of this is just to kill time in between the killings of irritating characters played by ugly actors, set to irritating music with ugly sound mixing. The overall sense that Shiver Me Timbers gives is that the filmmakers have little interest in the iconography of Popeye and are much more interested in the 80s splatter films that are quoted from: Aliens, Evil Dead II, Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2.
That would be all well and good, except Shiver Me Timbers offers no style, no scares, no humour and nothing in the way of special effects. David Hallows, playing pre-mutation Popeye, has a reasonable amount of fun, but is barely in the film for long. Post-mutation Popeye is played by a bodybuilder and a digital headswap. Given how very little money and effort clearly went into the film, the headswap looks almost impressive, in the sense that it gives the creepy effect of how the features of Popeye, the cartoon character, would look if he were an actual human. However, it’s very shoddy work of the kind that nowadays can be taken care of by AI for a relatively small subscription fee, and its inevitable digital imperfections mean it too often comes out looking the wrong kind of creepy.
By comparison, I Heart Willie is almost a good film; it doesn’t outright insult its audience, demonstrating that some amount of actual effort went into crafting a story, characters who feel like characters, and a pretty cool design for its Mickey Mouse killer, whose leather mask sometimes looks more like papier mâché, in a good way. Since Willie, as the killer is known, lives in a shack in the woods and collects skin, the creepy effect is entirely appropriate. We’re given an actual story, in which a group of four travel into the woods looking for creepy content for a YouTube channel, and each of the four has distinct personalities and benefits from a cast who actually appear to be professional actors. The writers bother to give us a story which develops, and the late-story developments work well. If you’re looking for a low-budget slasher film in which the killer wears a Mickey Mouse mask, I Heart Willie is precisely that and won’t leave you bitterly disappointed.
That’s not to say that either film really justifies its existence. Another thing that they both share is a slightly devil-may-care attitude, summed up by title cards which inform us that “Steamboat Willie” is public domain (never mind that producer/screenwriter David Vaughn grants himself a “characters by” credit) and, more egregiously, Shiver Me Timbers claims to be based on real events. But both are designed more to give viewers the frisson of watching something slightly outlaw-ish, than they are to ward off the lawyers from Disney or King Features.
Over the next few decades, unless the law changes again, we’ll see many more icons enter the public domain: Superman, Batman, James Bond, The Hobbit. And a huge number of cultural immortals have been public domain for some time with no real fanfare when their status changed: Sherlock Holmes, Dracula, Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland. Some works, like Night of the Living Dead, were never protected by copyright in the first place. And a good-sized chunk of the world has just never cared for copyright law – if you want to see some genuinely transgressive media involving Popeye, Mickey Mouse and other cartoon and comic-strip regulars, look up the strange world of Tijuana Bibles, distributed underground back in the 30s.
So, hopefully in time the appeal of productions like these will wear off and we won’t need a low-effort slasher to appear for every work whose copyright expires.