Les rats de Manhattan

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

This film has some great elements such as some awesome 80's synth music, ridiculous over the top 80's outfits and character names (Lucifer, Taurus, Video). It does also contain some cringeworthy elements such as animal abuse which is common in foreign movies from as recent as the 90's. One moment you have characters talking about the indecency of humanity, and saying how rats don't deserve the punishment they get, and the next has the actors kicking live rats like footballs and beaming them with beer mugs. The acting, lines, and delivery bridges well into the absurdly bad, with one "joke" sticking out to me in particular. The character Lucifer is stuck in his sleeping bag and having trouble with the zipper, Taurus unzips it, and makes a comment about calmness being the virtue of a leader... then suddenly everyone is bursting out laughing like its the funniest thing they ever heard. Even Taurus who delivered the line is doing full belly wide mouth open head back laughter. Maybe you have to be in a rat filled apocalypse to understand the joke...

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.

It's 225 years past the nuclear holocaust. We are introduced to a band of post-apocalyptic bikers who are amazingly clean, especially their hair, which holds its body even on a long-dead planet. Their clothes are equally well preserved, and pressed. Even their spiked armbands are brand new! Perhaps this is due to the radioactive fallout.

Happening upon a ghost town, our anti-heroes search for supplies, soon realizing that the only living things left other than themselves are rats. Lots of rats. These are no ordinary rodents, since they devour human flesh. Even after several half-eaten corpses are found, the well-groomed bikers refuse to leave town.

When night falls, the real hoopla begins, and there are more rats running around than at Willard's birthday party! The bikers remain oblivious. Nudity ensues. Will any of these imbeciles survive?

RATS: NIGHT OF TERROR is one of those hilarious Italian horror films from the 1980's- the scene in which a rat puppet emerges from a biker's mouth is a particularly enjoyable moment of merriment! It contains the requisite gore, female nekkidness, big-big hair, and unnecessary animal cruelty.

As rubbish cinema goes, this is Grade-A vermin droppings. It's a howl to watch, in spite of the numerous stretches of mind-destroying dullness.

In the end, it's just a good thing that rats love cheeeze...