Chad

indiephantom

Sparkling new HD transfer of this out there from Blue Underground. I'm not sure I've seen any Bruno Mattei film beyound Cruel Jaws. I'm also planning on watching Hell of the Living Dead for this challenge.

Spiderbite

Well, this movie was pretty dang bad. Unfortunately I did not find it to reside in the "so bad it's great" category either. I had high hopes at the beginning. Really bad dubbing and hilarious dubbed voices. Real rats...no CG here! Apocalyptic clothing straight out of an MTV video (think Motley Crue's "Shout At The Devil" or Kiss' "All Hell's Breaking Loose" videos). And just plan old bad dialogue and acting.

Sounds like the perfect great/bad time, right? Unfortunately no. All this works against it and it just becomes a dull mess. The dialogue and voices get more obnoxious than funny as the movie wears on and the film just kind of wanders around with nothing interesting happening for what seems to be long spaces of time (even though it is just a 90 minute movie).

I was excited about the real rats. Well, I shouldn't have been. The rat attacks consist of real rats being obviously thrown and/or dumped at actors (in the extras of the dvd I rented, the director said that most were actually painted guinea pigs...awww, cute). The rats gearing up to "attack" the over-acting, frightened humans consisted of them bunched in a group, looking confused and or bored...which is what I probably looked like as well watching this movie. I never once got the impression that the rats were as "intelligent" as the group of humans kept saying they were.

The John Carpenter knock-off score was actually decent enough. Everything else was just poor though. Couple of good parts: the rat emerging from the woman's mouth and the body blowing up filled with rats and goo. All the rest was your normal stuff until the end. Think Night Of The Living Dead with rats (which is something the director states he was aping).

The end scene and reveal was great. I had kinda guessed the ending right before the reveal but it was still a great ending. And that was were the filmmakers fucked up in my opinion. This movie would have been much more interesting had the humans been battling giant, intelligent, human sized rats the entire time. I think they really dropped the ball there and that would have been the more interesting story. Almost like a "Planet Of The Apes" movie but replaced with disgusting rats. Now that would be a sequel that I would have loved to see.

My rating: *1/2 out of *****

PhantomStranger

While it's not a perfect movie, it has some very effective moments for low-budget horror. The script's dialogue is a little over the top, some writing polish could have made for serious improvement in tonal consistency. Real rats are infinitely scarier than the fake CGI stuff we get today. If you don't squirm when that one girl is trapped in a sleeping bag with the rats, you are dead inside.

I didn't think so highly of Blue Underground's HD transfer. Like many Italian productions, it was heavily filtered. The film print is in great condition but its actual resolution is not much higher than finely upscaled DVD.

Undeadcow

It is cool how the first 30 minutes or so just shows the rats aimlessly nibbling around in the background when it's obvious to the viewer they will strike. If the characters had been less cartoonish the focus on set-up could have paid off better.

The machismo of the characters plays well against the really tiny unassuming threat of the rats.

Somewhere buried in the post-apocalyptic fluff is a better movie than shows up on screen.

Great ending.Really awesome seeing the rat emerge from her mouth too.

Trevor

Anyone find it streaming anywhere?

Undeadcow

Now I'm starting to get paranoid everyone on the internet is secretly a rat...

SterlingBen

Too bad we won't get to have an OHMC next year, with the Nuclear holocaust and everything. Will you be top side savages or sophisticated rat people?

Trevor

Let's just hope the apocalypse happens after October.