RATS: Night of Terror

Credit: 7 Deadly Sinners Artpad

In the far future of a place where laws and civilization have no meaning, and people have three hour lunch breaks and there are no convenience stores, (Italy, I'm talking about Italy) a director named Bruno Mattei decides to make a monster movie about a horde of rats. Seeing as how he still has several cubic tonnes of sand and garbage left over from the set of Warriors of the Wasteland, this let's be generous and call it a 'feature' will be set in post apocalyptic realm. In a nuclear swept, but oddly livable surface gangs of humans roam around on motor vehicles having rejected both fashion sense and life with the other humans underground.

Seriously, look at them. Do they think these outfits are coming back?

This gang of rejects finds a bunker filled with advanced (for the eighties) technology, as well as clean water and food. Bodies too. They assume there must have been a fight, but no one's stayed around. Later it will become obvious that those who lived here were done in by rats of unusual intellect and defensiveness.

One moron called Video, or arcade, or video gamer; (I can't recall) finds a computer which he claims is in fact a video game. After attempting to play it and finding it as unresponsive a platform as the Jaguar CD, realizes that it is not in fact a game system. He then whines that he'll never get to see a real game.

This boggles my mind. This idiot is so infatuated with the concept of video games despite never seeing one in his life? So much so that upon discovering any electronic device he immediately assumes it is a video game? This guy couldn't even get the high score on a digital clock.

He couldn't even beat this.

Other gang members include the well bearded leader, a bald tattooed guy who acts like a Vulcan, a treacherous guy dressed like he's a member of Napoleon's army, a couple of girls, and some other goons. This gang is pathetic. They cry a lot and are way too tolerant of the guy who keeps trying to kill everyone else. I thought these were survivors, not a bunch of scared teenagers. What do they have guns for if they've never faced death before?

Stumbling around getting punked by rats, and falling to despair and rage, the besieged gang are picked off one by one as dramatically as possible when rats are dropped on you from off camera. Which actually does look really uncomfortable. What if one of the fake rats was real? Do you think you'd get a good reaction from the actors when something moves?

Napoleon betrays everybody a couple of times before getting offed, while the Vulcan provides a lot of deadpan exposition. They must have him on something to keep him from laughing when he delivers these lines. He reprises the exposition about how some people live on the surface and others below, (Thanks, we knew that from the opening already) and he tries to figure out the whole rat intelligence thing, but neither he nor anyone else seems to be able to get their head around the fact that rats may kill people. I'm not sure what the hang up is mind you; but they seem to think they're missing some part of the picture. They're not. Rats--->defending their turf---> killing you. Easy, really.

Logical even.

The group's leader doesn't want to leave with their vehicles ruined by rats, but he doesn't really have a plan to kill the rats either. He seems emblematic of the problems that this group has with indecisiveness. They should bring that up at the next group meeting.

Where motions from the floor are not actually rats.

The humans eventually come to accept that the rats are first killers, then intelligent, then assholes as well. (The rats seem to allow a truce, only to lead the humans to a lost companion who is now filled with rats) They find out that the computer they found before has on it a recording from one of the dead who describes coming from below the surface of the earth only to have their research station overrun with rats. Help is on the way, but will be much too late.

Fortunately the final survivors are saved just moments after giving up hope, (While being crybabies about it too) when from underground a horde of yellow hazmat garbed exterminators, (The aforementioned help --great timing eh?) appear to flush the rats out with poison gas. Boy, does that gas get around as well; they must have brought a whole lot of it. These people, silent and faceless as they are, are as frightening and probably more intimidating than a horde of vermin.

Please. Spray me directly in the face if you could.

After saving the survivors, the awful dialogue comes to the fore again as our two remaining surface dwellers try to make the case for brotherhood with the underworld dwellers...by playing on their sympathy towards the mentally retarded.

People do not talk to each other in situations like these as if they were giving a speech at the United Nations. I don't know if this is just a natural feature of this kind of camp classic, or just a consequence of translations making stilted dialogue inevitable. Certainly I've noted that Japanese shows can have dialogue that can be tone-inappropriate while grammatically correct like this. Imagine getting rescued from a burning building and telling the fireman, "Come, let us build a new better world from this wreckage." They'd probably think you're crazy.

But all this flowery dialogue helps the irony:

Turns out we're RATS yo!

I suppose this brings up a lot of questions about whether these guys are supposed to be humans who look like rats or rats that are humans, and how friggin' long this separation from these surface dwelling rubes was supposed to have been at this point. But it's a pretty cool ending so who cares.

When you think about it, the Rat people don't really mean any harm. (Not counting the accidental spraying of the humans with poison) They do understand what people say to them as they apparently speak English, and they helped out the survivors. Heck, they doubtlessly find smaller versions of themselves killing their brethren to be far more frightening than we do. Think if you were attacked by chittering little fleshy humans with large head to body ratios. That's be scary as crap.

Granted I suppose we didn't make the best impression on our hairy friends with the movie-ending screech of twist-ending-terror. Probably didn't help their self esteem any either.