Saturday, December 29, 2018

Rats: Night of Terror (1984)

Obviously Netflix is the go-to but it's important to note that Prime Video (free for Amazon Prime members) also has a shit-ton of streaming horror, including Rats: Night of Terror.   Filmed in Italy using the crumbling Once Upon a Time in America set, the director Bruno Mattei considered this to be his best work. 

225 years after a nuclear apocalypse, several amazingly-dressed survivors emerge from the bunkers underground to seek out a living situation on the surface.  They have names like Video, Chocolate, Taurus, and Lucifer.  I'm already obsessed with this movie, when five minutes in, they find a trove of food and pour straight up brown sugar into their mouths while dancing around.  Their newfound paradise is quite literally crawling with rats, including some that are feasting on corpses.

Someone literally just said "computers and corpses are a bad mixture" -- this movie is incredible.  Despite the massive presence of both corpses and rats, they decide to move right in.  Then the carnage begins.  Rats crawling out of people's mouths, people covered in rats getting set on fire, rats eating motorcycle tires, and rats spilling out of windows onto a squealing woman with 80s hair.   The battle with the rats rages on with several casualties.

This movie truly belonged on an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 -- it was so corny and overacted but also just so entertaining and fun.  80s horror excess at its best.  Check it out, the ending was just delightful ;)