Rats—Notte di terrore [Rats: Night of Terror] (1984)

(In French, On Cable TV, August 2021) Often mentioned as one of those so-bad-it’s-good cult favourites, Rats: Night of Terror is actually more fun than expected, albeit for narrow definitions of “fun.”  The film’s opening half-minute slams you in the face with paragraphs of narrated exposition boiling down to: this is a post-apocalyptic film. The following ten minutes are dedicated to introducing (in a fuzzy sense) the rather unlikable characters of the ensemble film: stylishly-dressed bikers stumbling into a bar that has some food and basement hydroponics, and then fighting off an unusually large number of flesh-eating rats. Like: bucketful of rats thrown at the actors, many of them (the actors) screaming senselessly. None of this makes sense, from the redundant exposition to the actress getting eaten to death by a single rat in a sleeping bag. It’s certainly not good, but it can be entertaining in wacky ways: watch the ineptness of writer-director Bruno Mattei, laugh at the absurd death scenes, leer at the pretty actresses (no, I can’t pick between Geretta Geretta or Moune Duvivier either), scream at the lousy seen-it-from-a-mile ending, gasp at the awfulness of the special effects or shrug at the endless pacing issues of a film that barely makes it to 97 minutes. Here’s the thing: it may not be good, but it is rather fun, and that’s not always obvious when discussing bad movies — too bad and no one’s having fun. Rats: Night of Terror has just enough to it (oh boy, that “computer” scene) to be entertaining.