La noche de las ratas

As cheesy, cruddy Italian post-apocalypse cinema goes, "Rats: Night of Terror" is constantly amusing and certainly NOT ever boring. It has enough uproarious moments to make it quite an acceptable diversion, and some brilliant lines (ex. "I'm gonna warm their whiskers!").

The story (credited to director Bruno Mattei) deals with a roving gang that comes upon an abandoned complex where they get inundated with rats that are more voracious, aggressive, and intelligent than normal. In order to ensure their own survival, they determine to make it an unsafe world for the rodent population.

Good fun all the way for its decently paced 97 minutes, it seems to suggest that the best way to survive a post-apocalypse future is to go underground. Luigi Ceccarelli's electronic score is a hoot to listen to, just like much of the dialogue. The dubbing and vocal performances, as is often the case for this sort of thing, are just hysterical, with the on screen performers gamely going with the flow of this material. It's extremely cool to note that leading actor Ottaviano Dell'Acqua, billed as Richard Raymond for English language prints, is the man behind the infamous "worm eye" zombie from Lucio Fulci's "Zombi 2". Besides Dell'Acqua, people will also recognize Geretta Geretta (billed as Janna Ryann) from Lamberto Bava's "Demoni". The funniest performance comes from Henry Luciani as Duke, what with his facial expressions.

Wonderful gags include a rat emerging from a victims' mouth. The overall mood and feel of "Rats: Night of Terror" is a great study in decay and despair, and pretty much everybody in this cast of characters is fair game for a hideous demise. And the movie rewards all viewers who stick it out to the end with a priceless final revelation they won't soon forget.

Don't listen to the naysayers...at least give this goofy bit of Euro escapism a chance. It may be of the endearingly bad kind of experience, but for this viewer it wasn't so bad it was good. It was so bad it was a RIOT.

Eight out of 10.

This is probably one of the funniest movies I have ever seen in my entire life. Rats is hilariously inept and goofy beyond imagination. First of all you have the scenes of Rats attacking. You can almost spot the stagehands throwing the rats towards the actors... then there's the scenes of horror when the actors discover some evil, nasty mutant rats... who just sits there, doing nothing that would resemble anything remotely scary. And lets not forget the conveyor belt. There is a scene where our bold and poorly dubbed heroes try to get away from a teeming mass of mutant rats... and the mass consists of furry things (who does not even move) on a conveyor belt. Oh boy, oh boy. Then there's the ending... This movie would be an awesome doublebill with Bruno Mattei's equally inept Hell of the living dead. They sure don't come funnier than this.

Ah, these were the days for sure. Rats is a post-apocalyptic sci-fi horror by the one and only Bruno Mattei. If you've seen anything else by this guy you will no doubt know exactly what to expect. You'll be aware that you are going to see a shoddy but enjoyable trash-fest with many laugh-out-loud moments of unintentional humour. This film is full of typical Matteisms. It's ram-packed with extreme over-acting, over-the-top maniacal laughter, stupid chat and atrocious dubbing. It's got lots of gore, comically unthreatening monsters and moments of alarming non-political correctness. It's unashamedly derivative and incurably cheesy. And yet despite - or perhaps because - of all this, its loads of fun.

Like many bad films there is a scrolling text introduction. This is an easy way for cheap-skate film-makers to give us the background story and context without having to go to the trouble of conveying this information cinematically. Anyway, it basically boils down to the fact that the Earth is scorched after a nuclear war and some people live underground, while others live on the surface. A band of the latter pitch up at an abandoned settlement and discover that the previous inhabitants had been killed by super-intelligent nasty rats. Guess what happens next.

In a lot of horror films the most interesting characters are the villains and monsters. Not in this film. The rats for the most part act in a completely indifferent manner. This of course makes for some very funny moments when our heroes act as if they are a terrifying threat. A couple of such scenes spring to mind. Firstly when the gang mount a set of stairs covered in rats, the implication is that this is a super-scary moment, while the reality for all to see is that not only do the rodents pose no hazard whatsoever, they also are actually actively hiding away. Secondly, the scene where the leader of the gang wards off the hordes of rats with a flaming torch is properly silly as not only are the creatures a good twenty metres away in a small utterly unthreatening group but they also approach the flaming stick with zero concern when it is finally thrown on the deck. Prior to this silly scene, we are treated to what can only be described as the rat conveyor belt. This somewhat incredible cinematic device is a 'special effect' created for the film that is evidently supposed to suggest hordes of scary rodents moving forward menacingly. It doesn't. It looks like a conveyor belt with 2D rat-shaped cut outs stuck on it. It's quite something else. It does have to also be said that seeing as this is an Italian production there are a number of scenes where the rats are quite obviously getting battered or burned. They are thrown at actors, kicked by actors, have heavy objects thrown at them and set on fire by flamethrowers. With this in mind I'm very surprised this one got a BBFC certificate to tell you the truth.

In all honesty the gang are a lot more memorable that the rodents. One of them is called Video. He is supposed to be a computer genius, yet he says things like 'stupid machine needs a kick in the balls'. Another character called Deus is supposed to be the brains of the bunch as he has a shaved head with a little triangle drawn on it. At one point he goes into a long spiel about how rats lived in the days before the War. He qualifies his rambling rubbish with the line 'I read it in a book'. He says it so ludicrously portentously that it is laugh-out-loud funny. The only black character is a woman called, wait for it, Chocolate. At one point she covers herself in flour and says something along the lines of 'I'm white like the rest of you, ha ha ha'. Right on baby. The final character I shall draw your attention to is a guy called Duke. He is the villain of the group and is relatively unremarkable. Until is death that is, when he stands in an armoured vehicle with a grenade and then notices that there are some rats in the car with him, so he does what any sane person would do – he throws the grenade at them and blows himself up.

If you haven't already worked out then I have to say that this film was a bit of a comedy classic. It mixes cheap sci-fi with gory horror and levels it all off with a dollop of unintentional stupidity. It's a riot. And wait until you see the ending. If you thought things could not get any more ridiculous, you are in for a treat.

Do you like competent actors? Senseical plot lines? Good writing? If you do (and you all saw this coming) do not watch this movie! On the other hand, if you like a good cheesy plot, some over-the-top gore, gratuitous nudity and buckets of lab mice painted black....this is the movie for you!

Just look at the title: What would you expect from a movie called "Rats: Night of Terror"? Hell, that title is the only reason I bought the film! It just screams cheesefest, and let me tell you there's nothing wrong with that. Sure the actors suck, sure some of the lines are horrible (Stupid machine needs a kick in the balls!), but who cares? Doesn't that just make it that much more fun?

The gore is actually pretty well-done, surprisingly enough. The corpses near the first look great.

Oh, before I forget: The ending! Even if you don't like this film, you NEED to watch the whole thing just to see the amazing ending. I don't want to spoil it, so I'll just leave it at that.

Overall if you don't enjoy cheesy movies, leave this one on the shelf. If you do enjoy the, this is a dream come true!

6/10

What starts out looking like a poor Mad Max type of film about a post-apocalyptic nightmare ends up a fairly well-done low-budget horror flick about a gang of futuristic nomads attacked by a whole lotta nasty rodents who are hungry for humans. The film unfolds as the rats slowly take control of the situation and trap the humans in ruins of a long-abandoned city, and prepare for the siege. The violence is pretty graphic as the rats seem to kill people from the inside out, and there are some nasty scenes of rats popping out of dead bodies. This one should satisfy horror fans with its violence, somewhat interesting storyline, and a bizarre and unusual ending. Recommended for fans; one of the better killer rat flicks.