Whether you like this or not will probably depend on your enjoyment of 80's style horror. It's a fun, cheesy 80's flick. Dachshunds dressed up in rat costumes terrorize the city. There's really nothing more to it than that. Set in an unnamed city with Toronto doubling up for a cold, snowy location in the US, jobsworth government health official Kelly Leonard (Sara Botsford) seizes a huge batch of imported grain that has been found to be loaded with steroids. As the owner of the offending batch watches on, Kelly and her righthand man George (Scatman Crothers of The Shining) burn the whole containment which inadvertently forces the resident rat population scurrying for the city sewer system. Not a huge problem as the underground tunnels are already home to thousands of the furry critters but as these particular rodents have chowed down on the steroid infused grain these are not your normal vermin. Mutated, oversized and extremely aggressive, the super rats are now loose in the city and seemingly growing in numbers attacking anyone or anything unlucky enough to cross their path.
Despite a rather tired premise The Rats remains entertaining enough as long as you can ignore plot holes, hokey science and questionable special effects. Robert Clouse keeps the pace brisk and the movie is well worth seeing alone just for the cinema attack scene and the subway train finalé (which leaves The Rats wide open for a sequel that for whatever reason never materialised). Why the filmmakers attached James Herbert's name to the credits when not one soul could muster the energy to read the source novel is beyond me; Herbert should have taken legal action appropriately, but hopefully (if he did not) he received a payment of substantial worth anyway. This is not an adaptation of the Herbert novel at all, as the screenwriters seemed to have invented every other plot point on from the time when the boy gets his hand bitten by a rat. True, Herbert's book would have been too gross and expensive to film but this is a ludicrous movie counterpart at best.
Overall rating: 6 out of 10.
Despite a rather tired premise The Rats remains entertaining enough as long as you can ignore plot holes, hokey science and questionable special effects. Robert Clouse keeps the pace brisk and the movie is well worth seeing alone just for the cinema attack scene and the subway train finalé (which leaves The Rats wide open for a sequel that for whatever reason never materialised). Why the filmmakers attached James Herbert's name to the credits when not one soul could muster the energy to read the source novel is beyond me; Herbert should have taken legal action appropriately, but hopefully (if he did not) he received a payment of substantial worth anyway. This is not an adaptation of the Herbert novel at all, as the screenwriters seemed to have invented every other plot point on from the time when the boy gets his hand bitten by a rat. True, Herbert's book would have been too gross and expensive to film but this is a ludicrous movie counterpart at best.
Overall rating: 6 out of 10.