The Rats (2002) Review

WEEK 3: CREEPY CRAWLY CRITTERS 

The Rats (2002) Review

Welcome to an all-new week of Clayton’s Creepy Cinema, all about creepy crawlies! This might sound like a contradiction, but while I love watching movies where animals run wild and terrorize humanity, I love animals in real life. I think 99.9 % of the creatures on this planet are awesome—I even like insects and spiders, critters many people detest—but there is one animal on this planet I cannot bring myself to love, and that is the rat. Not domestic rats, but the big, ugly, grey varmints that infest major cities. I hoped to get a good scare out of The Rats, a made-for-TV-horror movie about rats invading New York City. I can say my hatred for the rodents is neither less, nor any greater, after seeing it.

The opening scene has a young, attractive woman going into a department store and trying on a new outfit. She removes her shirt, her bra, and her pants, and the camera doesn’t cut away. It’s a cheap attempt to attract viewers (though, admittedly, pretty effective). The girl gets a cut on her finger and consults the store’s manager, who is also a single mother, and the main character, with an unfortunately bitchy expression throughout nearly the entire run time. The girl with the finger cut later becomes hospitalized, and the store manager is concerned about the news that a rat bit her and caused her sickness. She hires an exterminator to investigate, and joins him in his exploration of the store’s underbelly, where they discover a colony of genetically-engineered rats capable of taking over the entire city and devouring everyone in their path.

If The Rats had been made today, it probably would have been ten times worse, because it would have been on the SyFy channel with purposefully cheesy acting and dialogue and effects. In the realm of TV movies, The Rats isn’t that bad, but in the realm of killer animal movies, it is, to quote Immortan Joe a la Mad Max: Fury Road, “Mediocre!” Most of the events play out more like a mystery film than a horror flick, and unfortunately, the mystery is not that compelling. There are basically two types of killer animal films: character-driven and creature-driven (examples of character-driven: Jaws, Arachnophobia, examples of creature-driven: Lavalantula, The Food of the Gods). The Rats would have been perfect for a creature-driven tale with rats devouring people left and right, but I guess since it was a low-budget TV movie, they opted for character-driven, and as a result, the majority of the movie is mainly just scenes with the two leads interacting, and hardly any rats.

The exterminator guy is fairly likable, but the store manager is written as a cliché, scaredy girl, and is either annoying or boring in every scene. They have no chemistry, and their interaction is dull most of the time. It makes little sense why she would want to join in the exterminator’s hunt for the rats, and that brings me to two other huge problems I had with this movie. The hunt for the rat nest is tedious and slow, with a stupid jump scare thrown in and little to hold even the most patient viewer’s attention. The eventual reveal of the massive rat colony under the department store should have been this epic, shocking reveal, but they merely walk in, see a bunch of rats crawling around, they look around at them, then slowly walk out. There’s zero suspense or excitement.

The first rat attack happens early on, and it’s surprisingly gory and well done. There’s a mix of real rats and cgi swarms, and the cgi looks decent nine-out-of-ten times it’s used. It’s mainly used for the larger swarms in wide shots, and for something meant to be shown on TV, it’s perfectly acceptable. There are a couple close-ups with cgi that look awful, but these brief moments are forgivable. The real-life rats perform quite well—crawling, swimming, the usual rat behaviour—and are pretty entertaining. The next attack scene hits a predictable beat, but occurs in an unexpected location: a swimming pool. This makes it seem like the movie has promise, but once that second act kicks in, the fun evaporates, and it becomes dryer than the Sahara desert.

The scenes with rats aren’t bad, but they’re too few and far between. There are huge gaps without any action, and the dialogue between the characters is incredibly uninspired. The phrase “I hate rats” has to be uttered at least half a dozen times in the ninety minute runtime. There aren’t nearly enough rat attacks in the second act, but then, just when I was about to lose hope, the ending kicked in, and it turns out most of the action was saved for the last twenty minutes. They attract the rats into an empty swimming pool, and the rats spurt out of drains in the pool bottom like they’re liquid (because there’s so many of them). The pool full of rats is definitely the best part of the movie; it’s just unfortunate that it comes at the end. For most viewers at that point, it probably feels like too little, too late.

The Rats is fun enough to watch once, but has little replay value. It’s above-average for a TV movie, but below average for a killer animal film. The rat action is worth trying to power through the dull character development and talking scenes, and it’s less campy than you might anticipate.