With evil, size doesn’t matter.
Mikey is a Slasher Movie made in 1992 about a 9-year-old psychopath who longs for a loving family after being abused by his original family. When he feels that his foster families don't love him, he murders them or anyone else who makes him angry. The film stars Brian Bonsall as the title character and features John Diehl and Josie Bissett as his adoptive family members.
It received the Rifftrax treatment in June 2022.
Tropes featured in this film include:
- Antagonist Title: Mikey is the film's villain, despite being a nine-year-old boy.
- Abusive Parents: Mikey's biological parents are suspected to have been abusive to him. Which would explain a lot.
- Adults Are Useless: No one believes Ben and Jessie about Mikey's sociopathic behavior until it's too late.
- The Bad Guy Wins: The film ends with Mikey going to live with another family, facing no retribution for the murders he committed.
- Bad People Abuse Animals: Mikey breaks the neck of Jessie's pet cat Rosie with his bare hands and feeds Ben's pet frog to piranhas.
- Batter Up!: Mikey kills his first foster father by bashing him in the head with a bat.
- Big "NO!": Neil, when he sees the dead bodies of a child skeleton, Mr. Jeinkins, Miss Gilder, and Rachel at the dinner table, followed by Mikey blowing the house up with a Molotov Cocktail, killing Neil in the process.
- Bullying a Dragon: Mikey's first foster family were dead guilty of this. They slapped and scapegoated him, and hardly showed him any genuine affection merely because he's not biologically related to them, so he does them all in.
- Creepy Child: Mikey. He kills people and animals, and has no qualms about peeping on a much older girl.
- Critical Psychoanalysis Failure: It's possible that Mikey's just a very good actor, but none of the doctors realize a thing.
- Double Entendre: Everything Mikey says to Neil and Rachel in their introduction is a massive hint to what he did to his other set of parents.
- Electrified Bathtub: Mikey killed his first foster mother by throwing a hairdryer into her hot tub. He also kills David by kicking his stereo into the bath.
- Enfant Terrible: Mikey is a very, very messed-up nine-year-old.
- Establishing Character Moment: In the film's opening moments, Mikey Holt is shown to be a troublemaker and a serial killer who burns his adoptive sister's papers and steals her doll. Then, he proceeds to kill her in the pool.
- Evil Orphan: Mikey is a textbook example: a Self-Made Orphan, serial killer with a Freudian Excuse, who uses his youth and supposed innocence to avoid detection.
- Family Extermination: Basically Mikey's MO. He goes from family to family, killing everyone before moving on to his next victims.
- Genre Blindness: For a man who claims to love horror movies, Mr. Jenkins isn't aware he's in one.
- Here We Go Again!: "Are you going to be my new Mommy and Daddy?"
- I Just Want to Be Loved: Mikey's main motivation.
- Karma Houdini: Mikey gets away with two sets of murders.
- Kids Are Cruel: Well, they don't get much crueler than one who's a serial killer.
- Make It Look Like an Accident: Rosie's and David's deaths.
- Male Gaze: Mikey certainly likes to give Jessie a good looking...
- Manipulative Bastard: Mikey via being a Deliberately Cute Child.
- Murder the Hypotenuse: The moment you knew Jessie had a boyfriend you knew he wouldn't last the film.
- Never My Fault: Beth, Mikey's (first?note ) adoptive sister, acquits herself of the fire Mikey started which he claims he only did because Beth asked him to. Beth denies this and is believed by her mother, while Mikey gets a slap in the face. Angry and feeling betrayed, Mikey takes Beth's doll toy and uses it as bait to drown her in the pool.
- Obviously Evil: In the first five minutes of the film, Mikey kills his little sister and one set of parents.
- Recycled In Space: The film is like The Stepfather, but with a young child instead of a fully-grown adult.
- Stalker with a Crush: Mikey towards Jessie, watching her undress, sneaking into her room, the usual.
- Self-Made Orphan: Mikey kills both sets of adoptive parents he receives.
- Shout-Out: The film's tagline references Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street.
- Troubling Unchildlike Behavior: Mikey murders entire families, kills animals and peeps on Jessie, while she is undressing or going into her room.
- Too Dumb to Live: Rachel, she sees the video tape of David's murder and getting attacked by Mikey with a hammer she doesn't leave the house
- Totally Radical: They do actually say 'radical'.
- Villain Protagonist: Mikey is the main character of the film.
- Weakened by the Light: During a Shirts Vs. Skin game, Mr. Jenkins tells Mikey to take off his shirt because he's a Skin, but Mikey wants to be a Shirt, because he says he's allergic to the sun.
