It is hard to rate some trashy films. Films can be really good entertainment in spite of themselves, and it is an even better pleasure to find some trash that keeps surprising you than watching most quality films. My friend says that he knows a trash film is worth something if it gets three laughs out of me. I mean proper, good belly laughs when you can't believe what the film is showing to you. That's as good a rating as any for these movies. Any film that has these three laughs has a special place in my heart.
Rats: Nights of Terror (Rats - notte di terrori). Italy, 1984
Director: Bruno Mattei
It is Chinese New Year and now starts the Year of the Rat. What better time, then, to revisit probably the most coherent film in the filmography of the schlock maestro Bruno Mattei. We might meet him in this column again a couple of times. Usually, he makes films that are cheap rip-offs of popular Hollywood movies. The fun comes from his ineptness in recreating working scenes on one hand, his inventiveness in mashing up two flavours and making his super-cheap budget work for him on the other.
A lot of fans of crappy movies absolutely detest Mattei. But usually even they make an exception with Rats. It is a sort of rip-off of The Warriors, Night of the Living Dead and your basic animal attack -movie. A group of young post-apocalyptic bikers seek shelter in a house that happens to be a breeding ground of super-intelligent and super-violent rats. The apocalypse hasn't hardened these kids too much, they are shaking in their boots the whole time. Most of the movie is shot pitch black, in order to hide the fact that Mattei really has no skills at his disposal to actually direct rats to do what he wants to. Troll 2 bad-movie maestro Claudio Fragasso worked as a co-director.
Three laughs (SPOILERS!):
1. I am against animal cruelty, and feel strongly that even rats used in movies need to have rights to prevent them from being harmed. But anyhow, I am not a good enough person to not laugh when scenes come on where rats supposedly jump and attack characters, since basically they all just look like a guy off-camera (perhaps above them) is just throwing bagloads of rodents at them. If it's any consolation, I bet a big percentage of those are just stuffed animals, since live rats tend to cost more. And rats always land at their feet.
2. Since the rats don't actually move that much, the actors try their best to sell they are in mortal danger. But the hamming it up just comes across that they are scared in the Scooby-Doo sense. They are a cartoonish bunch anyhow, with each having a stock characteristic or a skill. And of course they seek to boink the girls of the group in the hilariously seedy mansion, not caring even if they are in the same room as their friends, who are actively trying to avoid eye contact.
Also the film's rats seem mostly want to avoid people, no matter what Mattei tries to sell us. Particularly any scene in a staircase where characters try to avoid any proximity to rats makes them seem hilariously fragile for supposedly hardened outlaws. Since rats won't just move towards the main characters, there is also a scene where some sort of cut-outs are clearly put onto a conveyer belt in order to advance menacingly.
3. The biggest laugh comes at the very end of the film, and is a surprise of the kind that I would really advise to see the film before reading this.
BIG SPOILER FOLLOWS
It turns out, Mattei had a twist ending on his mind, the like of Planet of the Apes or irony in the vein of Night of the Living Dead. As it has been a bit on the edge on why this film was set post apocalypse in the first place, the answer is given when dawn rises and our two survivors meet on with radiation-suited exterminators on city streets. When one of them removes their mask, we gat to see that they weren't human at all. They were some sort of wookiees, or gerbil-men. Or rather, I think what the film is trying to show us, is a man-sized rat who have taken over the world from the humans and are here now to exterminate even the last survivors. How's that for a twist, Mr. Shyamalan?
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