Review: Rats: Night of Terror (1984)
Directed by: Bruno Mattei
Starring: Ottaviano Dell'Acqua, Geretta Geretta, Massimo Vanni
Written by: Claudio Fragasso, Bruno Mattei
Music by: Luigi Ceccarelli
Country: Italy
Available on: Blu-ray/DVD (Blue Underground)
IMDb
Although shameless Italian director Bruno Mattei’s work is often derivative and sloppily made, I find myself, despite my best interests, enjoying most of his horror output. That misplaced joy extends to this, Rats: Night of Terror, which follows rough-and-tumble survivors of a nuclear apocalypse who stumble upon a refuge stocked with food, water, and, rather unfortunately, mangled bodies that have been gnawed to the bone by flesh-hungry rats. There isn’t much to the movie, other than a cycle of one actor and then another and then another becoming separated from the group and forced to sit still, screaming, for a long take in which hundreds of live rats crawl, and probably poop, on their face. Then fast-forward a few minutes and the rest of the group stumbles upon their gnawed corpse. There are the usual intra-group divisions and attempts to usurp leadership. But you can count on Mattei to inject a straightforward plot with enough silliness to maintain interest. The highlight of Rats is a scene that astutely addresses one of the unspoken realities of life in a nuclear-irradiated wasteland in which you’re forced to band together in close quarters for shared survival: you sometimes have to hang out in the same soiled, messy shelter — which, thank the Lord Jesus, is providing a too-brief respite from the searing acid rain and weather extremes — while two of your fellow survivors fuck with absolutely no shame. “Having to listen to you two humpin’ is pretty nasty,” the man closest to the sweaty, slapping skin observes. Besides that, Rats also features cinema’s most exuberant celebration of flour, a man who explodes into rats, wanton flamethrower use, wanton shotgun use for “mercy” kills on people that were already dead, wanton “leave them, it’s too late for them!” moments for people who could have easily been rescued, and a whole lot of hysterics in which the cast is constantly yelling their badly written lines at one another. It’s awesome to see Italian horror starlet Geretta Geretta (Demons) make it to the end for one of the more unexpected twists in the genre. Mattei reused some of the disrepaired sets from Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America, and honestly the movie looks pretty awesome as a result, with a definite mood that’s helped along by a very catchy synth score from Luigi Ceccarelli. Rats: Night of Terror is right there with stuff like Hell of the Living Dead, Contamination, and Wax Mask in that cozy middle realm of Italian horror that isn’t required viewing but definitely succeeds at holding your eyeballs for 90 minutes.
Overall rating: 6.5 out of 10
