Rats: Night Of Terror

AKA Rats – Notte Di Terrore / Blood Kill

Director: Bruno Mattei

When you think of prolific Italian horror directors the names Argento, Bava and Fulci are likely to spring to mind but an often forgotten driving force of the genre is Bruno Mattei. Now this might have something to do with his films not being anywhere near as good as the aforementioned but what Mattei lacks in quality, he makes up for in shear watchability and there’s no denying that his movies are at least fun… most of the time.

Bruno Mattei (often using his “Vincent Dawn” pseudonym among others) is a master of exploitation, having made films that fall into almost every sub genre including zombiesploitation (“Hell Of The Living Dead”), nunsploitation (“The Other Hell”), nazisploitation (“SS Girls”), cannibalsploitation (“Horror Cannibal 2”) plus in-name only knock off sequels like “Terminator 2” (aka “Shocking Dark”) and “Cruel Jaws” (aka “Jaws 5”).

Today’s film however, see’s Mattei tackle the subject of killer rats… or more specifically, killer rats in a post apocalyptic setting – two for price of one! Released in 1984, “Rats: Night Of Terror” has become one of Mattei’s more well known efforts outside of the knock off sequel films he made. This also sees Mattei writing alongside Claudio Fragasso, a name familiar to many due to being the director of “Troll 2”, amongst a host of other enjoyably shit films.

Now I know what you are thinking; any Italian horror movie that heavily features animals is likely to feature a certain degree of animal cruelty, which really is a blight on the genre and something I find deeply problematic. No form of entertainment should be made if animals have to be hurt or killed in the process and unfortunately “Rats: Night Of Terror” is guilty of this. When I started this blog I set myself a rule that I wouldn’t feature any film that contained any animal cruelty, however I am flexing this to review “Rats” as I think it makes for an interesting case study to back up the argument that a film can be made without the need to injure any animals at all. So, with that out the way, let’s take a look at “Rats: Night Of Terror”.

The film opens with a text crawl (and some very poor stock footage – a Mattei staple) explaining that in 2015, hundreds of atomic bombs devastate the planet causing people to move underground for safety. A century “after the bomb” a group of people decide to leave the sophisticated confines of the underground (which we never see) and begin roaming the surface of earth. These people are known as the “New Primitives” and it is a group of these primitives we follow for the duration of the film.

The group are your typical “Mad Max” style types and roam the deserted streets on motorbikes and other makeshift vehicles, such is the tradition in these types of films. I won’t go into all of the cast at the moment but it’s safe to say you will have seen these types of characters before if you are familiar with post apocalyptic type movies… although maybe not quite as badly written as they are here. You may notice at this point that the sets look pretty nice and quite elaborate for a low budget schlock horror film but that’s because “Rats” was filmed using many of the sets built for Sergio Leone’s gangster epic “Once Upon A Time In America”. That film had a budget of $5.3 million and whilst I can’t find any details of the budget for “Rats”, I think it’s fairly safe to say it was nowhere near that. I like the resourcefulness of it though, set recycling is certainly a good idea.

The group stop in a deserted town and after making sure it is safe (by waiting quietly for several seconds) they make their way into a nearby building to investigate. It is here they run into their first rat, and as you might expect from a real rat, he isn’t at all fussed by the humans and to be fair, the characters at this stage don’t seem frightened of him. If anything, they seem to be happy about finding one and even try and catch it whilst making comments about eating the rat. I can’t work out if these comments are serious or not. It’s only when the rats appear in groups do the characters seem to feel any kind of peril, even if the threat is still zero.

The gang eventually find some boxes containing food such as sugar and flour. Rather than conserving it or finding some way to actually make something edible with it they instead rip open the packets and begin gorging on the ingredients. Surely it can’t taste that great? Stuffing handfuls of flour into your mouth? Plus if you start eating raw sugar grains by the mouthful then surely you’ll need some emergency dental work fairly soon! I doubt there is a “new savage” dentist sat in the abandoned town waiting patiently for some idiot to show up. In fact, this recklessness extends to later in the movie when the group find a source of clean water, in to which they all immediately start dunking their grubby mitts – if anything, these people deserve to die. The real pierre de resistance of the food gorging scene however is when “Chocolate” (our only black character, played by Geretta Geretta of “Demons” fame) gets white flour poured over her head and she begins dancing around saying “Look, I’m all white, I’m whiter than all of you!”. Now it’s not only the animal abuse that makes this uncomfortable to watch.

The rest of the film basically involves members of the group getting bumped off in many rat related ways, some of which are actually quite funny, including a scene where it is implied a rat goes up a woman’s vagina, eats her from the inside then pops out of her mouth when the rest of the crew discover her! Another chucklesome fatality involves a character falling down some stairs into a room full of killer rats (although we only see a small group of very disinterested rats, grooming and wondering what the fuck is going on) while another character shouts “don’t fall!”. All of this leads up to the hilarious conclusion where the two surviving members of the group (“Video” named such as apparently he can play any video game, and “Chocolate” named such because…) think they are being rescued by humans, only to find that upon removing their gas masks, they are in fact a race of rat people! This raises too many questions, not least the biology of it all. The rat people are seen clearing the streets of rats in hazmat suits a la “The Crazies” but surely they are on the side of the “normal” rats? Unfortunately the rat man’s face has a striking resemblance to 80s kids favourite “Roland Rat” which undoes any dramatic tension the ending is supposed to have. “Kevin!”

“Rats” sports some awful dialogue and dubbing to the point it made me speechless and in fits of giggles at the same time. The lines of dialogue sound like something two eight year old boys would say when they are playing and making up imaginary adventures. Some highlights include: “Computers and corpses are a bad mix”, “Hey, what’s that? Looks like a phone, it is a phone, why don’t you ring, ting-a-ling”, (character opens a door) “It’s filled with rats!” (even though room is devoid of any rodents), “I’m going to warm their whiskers!”, “they’ve got us in a trap! There’s millions of them! I’ve never seen so many!” (when the previous shot had shown a handful of rats at best). You get the general idea. Sometimes it’s not even what the characters say that’s amusing, it’s the way it is said. I’ve never known a film that can have me in stitches over a line as simple as “hold this”.

The acting is bad, although it’s tricky to really know under such awful dubbing. The lines are delivered so straightly to amp up the drama and tension that it ends up having the reverse effect and just makes it funny. If there were ever an example of voice actors over acting then this is the film and it’s full of scenes where the characters talk about how horrible the rats are to try and add to the minor peril they are in – “My god, they’re repulsive, it’s their teeth! Think of the diseases they can give you… hepatitis… meningitis… leptospirosis… the plague!”. If the film told us at the beginning that the band of characters were immunosuppressed and the reason they are scared of the rats was because of catching a disease rather than being eaten then it probably would have made more sense.

The characters themselves are caricatures of the types you would find in movies such as “Mad Max” and “Escape From New York”. Most notably, not one, but two Kurt Russell/Snake Plissken knock offs, one who is killed off fairly early on and one, actually called “Kurt” who is the leader of the group. Kurt is played by Ottaviano Dell’Acqua, who has made more of a career as a stunt man, but also acted in nearly 100 films including Italian horror favourites: “Zombi 3” and “Blastfighter”. He was also the famous worm eye zombie that adorned many of the posters for Lucio Fulci’s “Zombie Flesh Eaters”. We also have the young and reckless “Lucifer”, played by Jean-Christophe Brétignière of “The Sweet House Of Horrors” fame, who has no shame in banging his girlfriend, “Lilith” played by Moune Duvivier, in front of the whole group. Duvivier would only appear in three other films, with wide ranging roles such as “Girl on beach” and “Nun on bicycle”. The cast certainly aren’t the cream of the crop of Italian horror actors of this period but they are at least fun to watch.

The rat attacks mainly consist of the poor creatures being dropped en-mass onto the actors whilst they scream in terror. When we do get some actual model rats, they look very amateur and homemade, much like our lead character’s stick on beard. Some of the models look like nothing more than glorified finger puppets but at least no creatures were hurt making them and at least you can successfully simulate a rat attacking someone with a puppet. Sure it looks cheap and naff but dropping multiple rats on people’s heads just looks like that, rats being dropped on heads, and it doesn’t look like they are being attacked. The best/worst rat effect is when the filmmakers try to show a large group of rats traveling in unison towards our “heroes” and it appears they have simply put some featureless, stationary rat models (although they look to be closer to mice to be honest) on a piece of carpet and then pulled the carpet to simulate them moving. It looks like one of those horse racing games you get in amusement arcades. This is without a doubt one of the highlights of the films, but probably not in the way Mattei wanted. There is one pretty inventive moment late on in the film where the woman who was killed from the fanny up reappears as a kind of zombie, her body moving about because of the rats wriggling inside her. It’s only brief and to be honest, now I’ve typed it, it sounds way better on paper than it actually is on screen.

The musical score (if you can call it that) by Luigi Giuliano Ceccarelli sounds like he has just bought a new synthesiser and is just buggering about to see what it can do. That said, there is something about it which I quite like, in the same way I did with the score for Joe D’Amato’s “Anthropophagous”, although the music for that is far superior. There are two main themes, the first being the “someone having a fit on the keyboard” music (I’m allowed to say that because I suffer from epilepsy) and the other is a pretty effective gothic organ style piece. For some reason the filmmakers decided to close the film after its “dramatic” reveal with the former and it just makes it even more hilarious. If you are trying for a dark and tragic ending then surely you’d go for the gothic music? It’s not all bad though, there is some sweeping synth music, which has a nice moody feel and creates quite an eerie atmosphere.

If you are going to make a film about killer rats, then you are already facing the issue of rats not being scary, so real or not it makes no difference. The quality of this film does not hinge on the quality of the rat “special effects”, because there is so much else wrong with it (by conventional movies standards) that it really makes no difference. If anything it probably would have been more fun if they just used models or cuddly toys instead but the sad reality is, I suspect a box of real rats was far cheaper. Italian horror movies have much to offer, some are genuinely well crafted and scary films, whereas others fail miserably but are fun at the same time. Unfortunately though with many of the lesser grade movies there seems to be a feeling that animal life is cheap and the cruelty is used as titillation, or titillation dressed up as something profound, such is the case in Umberto Lenzi’s dreadful “Cannibal Ferox”. Directors which do this seem to have a very low opinion of their audiences; does it never occur to them that maybe viewers won’t enjoy seeing animals get hurt?

In the case of “Rats”, the enjoyment (if that is the right word) comes from the over the top acting, ridiculous dubbing and the sets (which as stated previously, weren’t built for this film anyway). It does make me wonder if Bruno Mattei was sat in his office one day and said to himself “right, I’ve got two dozen boxes of rats and the sets for “Once Upon A Time In America” aren’t being used anymore, how can I tie these things together?”. I don’t have a problem with the sets being reused, if anything it shows some level of ingenuity and the idea of the “new savages” works quite well and the scenes where the real rats aren’t involved are actually really fun. This would be a great party film if it wasn’t for the animal cruelty (that’s a strange sentence) but for anyone with any kind of compassion or moral backbone it makes it virtually unwatchable. I have no problem with grizzly depictions of violence on film between humans as long as the people involved in the film are comfortable with what is going on and no one actually gets hurt, but there is no excuse for the kind of barbaric behaviour seen in films where violence is inflicted on animals. Sadly I suspect at the time the filmmakers felt the extent of the cruelty towards the rats was nothing when compared to films such as “Cannibal Holocaust” or the aforementioned “Cannibal Ferox”, but the fact remains, animals were harmed to make this film, there’s no getting round it and even if the animals weren’t thrown about, dropped on people’s heads or had fire waved at them, they look in a pretty poor state which makes me think they were kept in less than ideal conditions. I realise I am viewing the film 35 years after it was made and attitudes relating to this kind of thing has changed but even so, surely someone on set must have realised it was wrong? I like my exploitation cinema to feature consensual sex (between people), violence (also between people) and other things that are often too taboo for mainstream movies, but there is no space for animal cruelty in my definition of exploitation entertainment. There are some lines that shouldn’t be crossed. I suppose there is something to be said about the way attitudes have changed over time as most people will acknowledge now that this is not acceptable but even so, it should never have happened in the first place. If you can find a cut version of “Rats” that removes the problematic moments then it would be worth a watch, but I suspect no one gives a fuck enough to do so! We should at least be thankful that when Mattei made “Cruel Jaws” he couldn’t afford to get a real shark.