"This story begins on the surface of the Earth in the year 225 A. B. (After the Bomb)," In the future a gang of scavengers on bikes stop at an abandoned town, they settle down for the night but the place is infested with killer rats. What we have here is a post apocalypse science fiction movie combined with nature strikes back horror. The group look like they could have appeared in a Mad Max movie and have cool names such as Chocolate, Taurus, Video, Lucifer, Lilith and Deus. In addition to having to defend themselves from the rats they also have to deal with some in-group infighting. Rats was directed by one Vincent Dawn, real name Bruno Mattei. He also made one of my favourite guilty pleasures, "Zombie Creeping Flesh" (1980) and there are a few similarities between the two, though ZCF is far better. The badly dubbed actors come out with such amusing dialogue as - "If you must copulate why don't you go outside and do it?" to which Lucifer replies "Why don't you just shut up, I just getting ready to blast off!" "I'm going to warm their whiskers" one man says before attempting to burn some rats with a flame thrower. And when Lilith can be heard screaming from her bed one guy says "Something's wrong", really?? This amusing script is part of the fun. The rats themselves look quite harmless but when they attack they are obviously being thrown towards the actors by the crew. I wouldn't go as far as to say that Rats is a gorefest but we do see plenty of corpses that have been partially eaten and one of the standout effects has a rat come out of a victim's mouth. There is one sex scene which takes place inside a sleeping bag, later we see the couple showing brief male and female full frontal nudity. Then there is the ending, shocking and laughably silly in equal amounts, and very memorable for it! I have the UK Vipco DVD, I enjoyed this sufficiently to order a copy on blu-ray as I will definitely be watching this crazy French/Italian movie again.
Review of Rats: Night of Terror
