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Director: Bruno Mattei (with
Claudio Fragasso)
Screenplay: Claudio Fragasso, Bruno
Mattei and Hervé Piccini
Cast: Ottaviano Dell'Acqua (as Kurt);
Geretta Geretta (as Chocolate); Massimo Vanni (Taurus); Gianni Franco (as Video);
Ann-Gisel Glass (as Myrna)
A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #40
Another pairing of Bruno Mattei and Claudio Fragasso, and considering how many times they worked
together, one wonders if their relationship went beyond merely collaborating on
a film set to a friendship. Imagine the kind of bond, the conversations at
lunch between film shoots, that would've forged making films like Hell of the Living Dead (1980) and Rats: Night of Terror. Here, in the
meantime from that thought, Fragasso
touches upon a theme that does scare and creep many people out in the figure of
rodents. Mostly this is due to symbology - a pet rat, for me and for others, would
be exceptionally cute, whilst the fear of them is due to their centuries old
image as disease carriers in the wild. Wild rats present a sense of unease, suggest
general decay, their ability to breed quickly and even go as far as cannibalise
their own to survive disturbing in how they spread in rundown environments, their
cultural legacy as spreading the likes of the Black Plague still potent
centuries on because, even if it was technically their fleas with spread the
illness, it killed millions.
Instead of merely an animal
attack film however, which would've continued on the seventies tradition of
nature being vindictive and trying to kill human beings constantly, Rats - Nights of Terror takes on an
unsuspecting twist that was clearly influenced, as many Italian genre films, by
the success of the Mad Max films,
setting itself in a post apocalyptic sci-fi future. Set long after society has
blown itself up with nukes, a group of marauders male and female, trying to
survive on their own as explained in a very complicated opening narrative, find
an abandoned building. At first finding crates of still edible food is a joy to
them but they immediately find rat chewed corpses littered around the place as
well. Soon they'll eventually learn that the rats are only just responsible for
cleaning the meat off the bodies' bones but have more than likely killed them
beforehand too. The result is even more peculiar considering the style and tone
of the material.
I had been tricked by Zombi 3 (1988), itself
"special" in some of its dialogue exchanges, that Fragasso was more conventional in his
screenwriting style than I had come to learn, something clearly wrongheaded of
myself when you get to Rats. Far from
a detraction, it does mean that you have characters with very unconventional
names - Lillith (Moune Duvivier),
Video (Gianni Franco), Chocolate (Geretta Geretta with possibly the biggest hair even seen in an Italian
post-apocalyptic film) etc. Than beyond those names, at least in the English
dub, to the type of dialogue his characters have, such as Chocolate promise the
geeky Video that he can make her pregnant if he fixes a computer they find in
the building amongst such brief moments strangeness. Fragasso's obsession with environment issues throughout his career
is found here too, Biblical proportions even when you get to the dumbfounding
final twist, the group discovering the likes of plants being carefully grown in
the basement with a water purifier and realising that a project by scientists
was taken place in there, only to be found abandoned with rats on mass
everywhere.
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I have to confess though that,
for all its moments of entertainment, Rats
does suffer from being surprisingly conventional and repetitious at points. Were
it not for the little details, from the groups' military vehicle to the rats
being made intelligent through radiation, this could've easily been made an
animal attack film set in the regular day. It's a severely restricted film in
terms of plot too - the marauders sleeping in the building only to find
themselves having to try to survive the night from the rats - meaning that it
does repeat itself constantly, from people being slowly picked off to a lot of screaming
particularly from the actresses filling the soundtrack. Eventually, despite the
idiosyncratic nature of Fragasso's
characterisation, where everything borders between the profound to the absurd,
it eventually lacks the outrageous nature needed to make up for its sluggish
moments, not completely able to have the same strange aura of other Italian
horror films from this period. Certainly it has the gruesome practical special
effects - an un-PC incident with a woman naked in a sleeping bad, rats
exploding out of people let alone out of their mouths - but baring the sub plot
where a cowardly member tries to undermine their leader to save his hide, its
boiled down narrative does feel lacking in the excitable madness that some of
the best of Italy, the legitimately great works of genre let alone the fun
ones, had. In fact I prefer Hell of the
Living Dead out of Mattei-Fragasso's
period here from what I've seen, even in spite of how shambolic it is next to
this one's more polished appearance, because of how wider in scope its
ambitious story was.
Of course, Rats does have one of the best, most delirious ending twists of any
Italian genre film of this period, worthy of seeing Rats and redeeming it greatly, but I cannot ignore that considering
the promise it gives as a post-apocalyptic rat attack film, it does lack the
maddened energy of other Mattei-Fragasso
films I've witnessed. While being of a fly on the wall for their conversations
about making the film would've been wonderful to hear, as would how they dealt
will all the stunt rats (and guinea pigs and rubber rats masquerading for them)
on set, this does feel weaker as a film even in the context of admiring its failures.
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