Rats: Night of Terror



Rats: Night of Terror (1984) greatly resembles a standard “nature gets revenge” movie in confusing post-apocalyptic drag. (Yes, drag is my word for the day.) Set in the year 225 A.B. (After Bomb), Rats features roving band of survivors who find an outpost stocked with food, purified water, two partially eaten human corpses and hundreds of rats. Our heroes don’t quite figure out that something is wrong (why are the bodies all eaten up, but the easily available food isn’t?) until the rats begin attacking and killing them.

As near as I can tell all the actors in this movie were required to provide their own post-apocalyptic costumes, which explains the wide variety of styles. A couple of people are dressed like rejects from Easy Rider (1969), another couple appear to be influenced by the early 80s glam rock scene, and one woman apparently borrowed her costume from one of Alice Cooper’s back-up dancers. Also, headbands are the order of the day. If there’s one thing movies have taught me, it’s that hats won’t survive the apocalypse.



The rats in this film aren't content to just bite their victims death. They also stuff themselves down one woman's throat to suffocate her, and they burrow into the chest cavity of one poor guy so they can pop his rib cage open later on and give his friends a scare.

The dialogue in Rats is so awful it begins to approach some kind of poetry. In one scene our heroes find a computer, and the leader declares "Well, I don’t like this at all. Computers and corpses are a bad mixture."

It's tough to talk about Rats: Night of Terror without mentioning the ending. As the number of survivors dwindle they become aware that the outpost is just a part of a complex that extends deep into the ground, where people may still live a civilized life. As our heroes fight for their lives, people clad in full decontamination suits and gas masks emerge from a manhole cover and begin spraying gas around (with a leaf blower, but never mind). The rats disappear and our heroes are surrounded by the people, one of whom removes his gas mask. If you don't want the ending of the spoiled you may not want to look at this picture.



Yep, it's a man-sized weasel. Or possibly Donald Trump, the movie leaves it ambiguous.

Posted: Sun - March 21, 2004 at      

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