RATS - NIGHT OF TERROR (1984)

 

DIRECTED by Bruno Mattei

SCREENPLAY by Claudio Fragasso & Bruno Mattei from a story by Bruno Mattei

STARRING - Ottaviano Dell'Acqua as Kurt

Geretta Geretta as Chocolate

Massimo Vanni as Taurus

Gianni Franco as Video

Ann-Gisel Glass as Myrna

Cindy Leadbetter as Diana

Henry Luciani as Duke

Fausto Lombardi as Deus (as Tony Lombardo)

Jean-Christophe Brétigniere as Lucifer (as Christoph Bretner)

Moune Duvivier as Lilith

Christian Fremont as Noah (as Chris Fremont)

PLOT - The year is 225 AB (After The Bomb), a post apocalyptic world where the descendants of the survivors of the nuclear holocaust live underground, free from the irradiated wasteland of the old world.

However, not all humans want to live below ground, some choose to find their own way in the devastated world above. One such group is a band of nomadic bikers led by the man they call Kurt.

Kurt and his gang arrive in the bombed out ruins of the city that was once, long ago, named Manhattan. Once there, they decide to stay for the night in the deserted remains of an underground research lab.

But...they are not alone. Very soon they are fighting for survival against a colony of mutated, flesh eating rats. It's a battle to the death between man and rodent and only one can survive...

PERFORMANCES -  I'm just going to come out and say it straight - ALL the performances in this film bar none are absolutely terrible. Normally in dubbed Italian films like this you can at least give the actors the benefit of the doubt due to the dubbing. Not here. Here even the dubbing reaches new heights in terribleness.

For a start all the actors seem to be playing their roles with cartoonishly exaggerated body language - a character sees a killer rat, they don't just scream or look repulsed - they thrash their limbs about like they're having a fit and bug thier eyes and scream hysterically. It's as bad as it sounds...and as funny.

Then we get to the dubbed voice acting - now this is usually bad but here it's definitely of a worse standard than we've ever seen. The voice actors seem like they're trying to match the sheer level of OTT hysteria that the physical actors are displaying - again it's funny as Hell but at least it matches what we see on-screen, so that's something I suppose.

All the characters themselves are complete and utter stereotypes, and even though this is an 80's movie they all look like they've stepped straight out of a 70's AIP biker B-movie.

We've got gang leader Kurt (Ottaviano Dell'Acqua) who seems to "lead" by flapping his arms about in dramatic gestures and shouting a lot, he also has the unfortunate habit of wearing a bright red ascot which even Fred from Scooby-Doo would think twice about wearing.

Then there's the brilliantly named Geretta Geretta as Chocolate - whose whole character seems to be that she's a) black and b) female - as you can imagine her character name as aged about as well as cold piss wine.

Massimo Vanni plays Taurus - whose strong (like a bull, y'see what they did there ?), Gianni Franco as Video, so named because he's good at video games (hang on - he's living in a post apocalyptic wasteland, I highly doubt there's many copies of Pac-Man kicking about).

There's also Ann-Gisel Glass as Myrna, who seems to spend the entire movie screaming at the rats and/or the various corpses of victims (she's been travelling through an irradiated badland for presumably several years, surely she's seen hundreds of corpses by this point), at least she looks good in black leather. Then we get Cindy Leadbetter as Diana (a character who seems to serve absolutely no purpose whatsoever). Henry Luciano as Duke - an arsehole who's constantly trying to usurp Kurt as gang leader and the closest thing we get to a villain in this movie.

Fausto Lombardi plays Deus - He's a bit "mystical" (you can tell this because he's got some weird tattoo drawn on his forehead). Jean-Christophe Brétigniere as Lucifer - a guy who likes to shag his girlfriend in public. Moune Duviver as Lilith - who has sex with Lucifer and wears a top hat and Dracula cape for some reason (obviously Theatrical Costume shops are doing big business in post Armageddon America/Italy), and finally there's Christian Fremont as Noah - another character who serves no purpose at all.

Then we get the rats themselves - who just sit and watch these non-actors in a similarly bemused way as the audience does.

SEX & VIOLENCE - The aforementioned sex scene between Lucifer and Lilith is largely played for laughs as they bang each others brains out in front of thier fellow gang members (much to their annoyance) and then proceed to get stuck in their sleeping bag due to a dodgy zipper. It's probably the least erotic sex scene in cinema history. Judging by Lucifer's very fetching green eye shadow and overly theatrical manner, he looks like he'd actually prefer to get down and dirty with Taurus than anyone else.

Then we come to the violence and it's...not pleasant. As you'd expect there's lots of scenes of people getting attacked and killed by the Rats - and that's absolutely fine, that's what we expect to see in a film like this, that's what we WANT to see, and this film certainly delivers as we get some very memorable kills (my favourite being Lilith getting trapped in her sleeping bag - that damn faulty zip again- and it being HEAVILY implied that a rat has crawled up her vagina and eaten her insides), but, but, BUT this all comes with a heavy cost. That cost being the actual lives of many of the rats used in the film. Let's just say that animal welfare wasn't a priority when this film was made.

Throughout the film we see real life rats being stamped on, crushed and in one scene actually set on fire - all for real. Now I know lots of people think of rats as vermin (personally I think they get a tad too much bad press - the main argument being "they carry diseases", big deal - so do human beings and you don't see them being killed by "pest controllers"), but come on - a life is a life and blatant cruelty is blatant cruelty (at one point they even use real dead rats that where killed in a previous scene as "special effects"), the filmmakers COULD HAVE and SHOULD HAVE done better. Just saying...

SFX - We get quite a lot of decently gory looking human corpses in this film and also some great moments of body horror (particularly the moment when a horde of rats burst out of one character's body, literally causing him to explode in a shower of guts.).

Best of all though is when a squad of "humans" from the underground come and seemingly "rescue" the last two surviving gang members, only to take thier gas masks off to reveal that...they themselves are mutant humanoid rats.

It's the final image of the film and for some reason, even though it's obviously a cheap mask, it still looks sufficiently creepy to add an unnerving sting in the tail. Very unsettling and very well done (it's the coldly human eyes that do it).

From the sublime to the ridiculous - we need to talk about the "rat attacks" or as this movie has it - "pouring a bucket load of live rats over the actor's head to simulate a rat attack". It's not effective and both the rats and the actors look pissed off in equal measure.

We also get the scene where we see a swarm of rats rushing to attack or in reality a bunch of plastic rats stuck to a conveyor belt. Here's an idea - if you're going to use plastic rats from a joke shop to simulate a swarm of rats attacking then why not use plastic rats in the scenes where real rats are being flamethrowered, stomped and shot at ? Just a thought...

RATING - From reading the above review you probably think that I hated Rats - Night Of Terror, but the fact is - I DIDN'T.

It's ropey as hell but enjoyable in the best "bad movie night" tradition...the only problem is the abhorrent treatment of the rats in real life - no animal deserves to die due to someone wanting to make a shocking film and because of that I'm only going to award this film 3 out of 5. It would have been a 4 if not for the cruelty on display, but I can't in good conscience give it that. A shame.

ART -