The Rats Are Coming! The Werewolves Are Here!

Most people seem to hate this movie and basically anything associated with director Milligan. It's slow moving, has awful make-up and lighting and a huh (!?) chaotic ending, but some of the performances are actually pretty good, the overkill melodrama is hilarious and it's kind of interesting...for awhile.

In England, poor Gerald (Ian Innes) is in for a treat when he visits the family mansion of his new bride Diana (Jackie Skarvellis). Pa Mortimer (Douglas Phair) is a bedridden grouch, older sister Monica (Hope Stansbury) is a childish psycho, mom Phoebe (Joan Ogden) is a miserable mess and retarded brother Malcolm (Berwick Kaler) is kept chained-up in a secret room. Only the older brother seems normal. Something isn't right, as the son-in-law soon realizes, but his wife won't let him leave. Yes...they all turn out to be werewolves guarding the family secret.

The older insane daughter torments the chained up brother by insulting him and beating him with a belt in some outrageous out-of-place scenes. She also buys a cage full of flesh-eating rats from a grimy vendor and in a shocking, standout scene, nails a REAL rat on a board! The whole rat idea has no relevance to the plot and was added by the director to bulk up the running time and cash in on the success of WILLARD, so that (sort of) explains the title.

After watching Bloodthirsty Butchers I was afraid to watch this one, not for the horror but being horrified that it is another turkey. luckely it was better but still worse, the acting is better but still, yes you can guess it. Again there is a lot of talking in this flick and what the hell the rats are doing was not clear until I did my research. The movie was too short and the producer wanted some extra scene's, and that became the rat man with his, euh, rats. Nothing to do with the movie so you know it, the whole movie is a turkey. It's only in the last 10 minutes that the werewolfs arrive. Or is it carnival, man the make up is so stupid.It's all predictable what is going to happen, so no fear at all, no suspense and still Andy Milligan (the director) has his following, and still sells DVD's, this flick is a bit hard to catch and as always not that cheap.

The thing that attracted me to this movie was, of course, the bizarre and over the top title, but to be honest I wish the movie had been given a more generic name. This is the fourth film I've seen by the talentless Andy Milligan, and it's the third completely awful one. It would seem the director has an obsession with rich families and inheritance, as this is yet another film with a similar theme to Blood Rites and its crappy remake Legacy of Blood. This time, there's a family curse involving werewolves thrown in, but this doesn't make things any more interesting as the terrible acting and production values are still there, and this really is an awfully boring film. The plot pacing is trite throughout, and the film was giving me an itchy fast-forward finger before the final credits finally rolled. The special effects are tacky and ineffective, and there's not a single decent gore scene in the entire movie. Add extremely poor sound into the mix, and you have a film that isn't only boring and similar to other crappy Andy Milligan films, but one that you can't even understand! Overall, I wouldn't be callous enough to recommend this dross to even my worst enemy and you should take that as a reason not to bother seeing it.

Rats Are Coming! The Werewolves Are Here!, The (1972)

BOMB (out of 4)

Legend has it that Milligan turned in a 72-minute werewolf movie but the producer wanted a longer running time. WILLARD was making big bucks at the box office so twenty-minutes worth of rat footage was thrown in. The end result is one of the greatest titles in the history of cinema but that doesn't save you from the torture of sitting through the actual film. A wacky bride takes her new husband home to meet her even nuttier relatives and he soon discovers that they're all crazy and hiding a big secret (they're werewolves). This was my fourth Milligan movies and I'm a firm believer that those on Death Row should be forced to watch his movies for the rest of their lives because it's a punishment far worse than death or torture. In fact, while watching this movie there were several times where I started to fantasize about being put to death in the electric chair because it would have gotten me out of my misery a lot quicker than sitting through this mess of a picture. This is basically an incredibly bad, long winded and painful melodrama about family "struggles" with only the briefest of hints in regards to what the title offers. I was well aware of this going into the film but it didn't help matters because the dialogue, for the most part, is poorly written and there's not an ounce of energy to be found anywhere. The performances aren't as bad as you'd think but that really doesn't improve the film any. At least bad acting would have given us something to laugh at. People like Wood and Adamson are often attacked for being bad directors but at least they give the viewer something fun. That can't be said for Milligan whose ability to keep finding producers really makes me scratch my head. This is an incredibly horrid movie from start to finish and we also get several scenes were real animals are harmed so certain viewers might want to stay away if the horrid film itself wasn't enough to keep you away. Just wait to you see the rat attacks and the insane ending.

I'm not going to try to pretend that this (or any other Andy Milligan movie I've seen) is actually a good movie, but I can't help feeling there's a good movie buried somewhere in this mess, trying to fight its way out. The dialogue, while soap operatic, is reasonably intelligent, with none of the overt howlers that make (for example) Ed Wood's movies so laughably amusing. Some of the performances are pretty good. The principle locations are quite good. And there are moments of (twisted) imagination. But countering these assets are debits too numerous to mention. The technical standards are pathetic. Even granting that is was shot in 16mm reversal nearly forty years ago the picture is grungy and badly lit. The sound is so bad that you frequently can't understand what the characters are saying. The costumes were apparently whatever Milligan could get his hands on. The editing is poor, the make-up is poor, and (perhaps most unforgivable of all) for a horror movie the shock scenes are very badly handled. I'm glad I satisfied my curiosity by checking this movie out, but I don't think I could sit through it again.

And if that really was a live rat being nailed to a board, then that's the part that's TRULY unforgivable.