Original title: Rats – notte di terrore

Of all of the Italian post-apocalyptic Mad Max 2 (1981) rip-offs, Bruno Mattei’s Rats – Night of Terror is among the very silliest, and that’s up against some remarkable competition. It leads to a truly ridiculous twist ending (which will be spoiled here so proceed with caution) but in fairness, it’s rarely dull – there’s usually something going on. Admittedly it’s often something very stupid but it’s something, and that’s not always true of a Bruno Mattei film.

In 2015, the world was devastated by nuclear war (what do you mean, you missed it…?) and 225 years later, the deadbeat survivors still haven’t managed to rebuild much of anything. There’s talk of underground cities that we never see but above ground, the “New Primitives”, a very well-groomed bunch in a world that hasn’t known hair product for two centuries,  have banded together in groups to stay safe. One group of eleven, with odd names (Taurus (Massimo Vanni), Video (Gianni Franco) Lucifer (Christoph Bretner) – others are named after characters from Greek mythology and in a lapse of judgement that would never be forgiven today, a black character is named Chocolate (Geretta Geretta)) find themselves in an abandoned part of a city (supposedly redressed sets from Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America (1984)) where there’s plenty of food and water. Unfortunately, it’s also overrun by thousands of genetically mutated rats who start picking them off one by one.  With the group whittled down to a bare minimum, the survivors emerge from the building to find a clean-up team in bio-hazard suits gassing the rodents. The survivors’ gratitude is short lived however as one of the team removes their face mask to reveal that they’re a race of humanoid rats.

Uncharacteristically, Mattei, the man who also brought you such gems as Virus – l’inferno dei morti viventi/Hell of the Living Dead/Zombie Creeping Flesh (1981), L’altro inferno/The Other Hell (1981) and later Zombi 3 (1988), Robot da Guerra/Robowar (1988) and Terminator 2/Shocking Dark (1989), shows something like a scintilla of style here. He’s scuppered of course by the banality of the story, the unintended hilarity of the dialogue, written with his frequent collaborator Claudio Fragasso and some nasty animal cruelty. Several real rats are clearly set alight – they’re vile creatures but they don’t deserve that.

It never once feels like we’re actually in a post-apocalyptic setting, just in a rather grubby and rundown urban setting. It could just as easily be The Warriors (1979) with rodents and a barely sketched out science fiction twist. Indeed, in Germany, where Walter Hill’s gang classic was released as The Riffs, Mattei’s film was opportunistically marketed on video as The Riffs III.

And of course, there’s that ending. It comes completely out of the blue and makes no sense whatsoever. It’s a striking image for sure, but what does it mean? Probably nothing. Mattei and Fragasso simply needed a way to end their film and this, they probably thought, was as good as any. It’s certainly the one bit of the film which anyone who’s seen it will remember as the rest is the fairly standard issue post-apocalyptic wanderings about in the ruins business., albeit with lots of inventive rat attacks and idiot characters doing entertainingly silly things. This being an early 80s Italian film, there’s lashings of gore courtesy of Maurizio Trani, a pounding electronic score from Luigi Ceccarelli and wonderfully daft dialogue (“This stupid machine needs a kick in the balls!”)

And there’s not much else to tell really. If low budget, high silliness post-nuke films (it’s set in the year 225 A.B. – “after the bomb”) with lots of absurd things going on are your thing, you’re bound to get a kick of just how ridiculous Rats is. If you’re after a story that makes sense, decent acting or post-dubbing that hasn’t been entirely recorded at a pitch somewhere approaching flat-out hysteria, you’re in the wrong place. It’s slicker and better looking than most of Mattei’s other genre work but then it’s not really up against that much is it?