Tara (2001 Video)
6/10
A less-then-decent urban horror that doesn't have a whole lot of positives
9 April 2020
After it's declared condemned, the owner is sent to the tenets of the Forest Tower apartment building to live among them, and while he finds one of his tenets has befriended a rat that has been recruiting the other rats in the building to take revenge for his condition and tries to stop them before all the tenets are killed.

This one here does have a few good points to make it enjoyable. One of the better features is the fact that it makes the complex full of squalor and waste as the atmosphere here is suitably dirty and disgusting, which is the perfect setting for a film about giant rats. It's a likely breeding ground for them to begin with, and to place an emphasis on it here lends some credibility, and here it gives a pleasingly disgusting location that serves the film well in most respects. As well, the film also has a lot of credit to not have the rats be CGI and that they're real rats that are used are a great touch since they're more realistic in this manner. The other big part of the film is the rather fun last-half, which is where all the main attacks are centered around. There's a lot of fun to be had when they come across and rampage over everything, and that's a real joy. There's not a lot of gore in the film, but they're all centered around these scenes, and the mauled bodies and severed limbs here aren't that bad. It's also wall-to-wall action, with lots of attacks and escapes, making it also pretty thrilling when it comes around. These here are what make the film entertaining where it counts. This here was pretty flawed with several problems. One of the main ones is that there's way too much down-time at the beginning of the film. This one takes so long to get going that it feels way too long to get to the good points following the different adversities that befall them with the tenant's problems which get too deep to interfere with the action in here. This hurts the flow at the beginning, making it seem much longer than it is with all the time devoted to these problems that it just becomes too much wasted time so that when the attacks occur at the halfway point in the film it can get dull quickly and lose a lot of its luster. There's also a problem with the rats' abilities to understand English and carry out the complicated messages, seeing as how there's nothing in here that says that they do to begin with and why they chose the one individual in particular as someone to follow. The last flaw here is the aggravating and nonsensical directorial choices made several times throughout the film where it freeze-frames, slows down or even flips the image onto the opposite side in a reverse mirror image. It's not creative, shows nothing to help the film out and looks terrible, despite the creativeness of it, and it ruins the film just as much as the dull beginning. These here are the film's real problems.

Rated R: Graphic Language, Graphic Violence, Brief Nudity, violence-against-animals and drug use.
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