D: Jim Mickle
S: Nick Damici, Antone Pagan, Tim House, Larry Fleischman, Bo Corre, Ron Brict, John Hoyt, Kim Blair
S: Nick Damici, Antone Pagan, Tim House, Larry Fleischman, Bo Corre, Ron Brict, John Hoyt, Kim Blair
If a movie about were-rats infesting New York City sounds like something you'd be interested in watching, then this is definitely the movie for you. Assuming, of course, that plot, characters, and cinematography aren't all that important to you.
Yes, the idea of an infestation of were-rats starting riots in the streets of New York definitely has promise. And there's clearly an attempt to put an over-arching storyline in place - an Iraq War vet comes home on the night that all hell breaks loose, and attempts to make her way home to her neighborhood to see her father again. And to be fair, the movie starts off on a pretty good note...the characters are decently established, relationships are explained, and the neighborhood in general is laid out for the future insanity.
Then the infections begin, and the movie moves from a slow-paced character study into the realm of bad lighting and music-video cuts. Now, don't get me wrong - I'm very much in the camp of the less you show in a horror movie, the scarier it is (check out Session 9 for this - very little is shown throughout the whole movie and it's the creepiest film I've seen in a long time). But, I also think that if you're going to show something, you need to show it, and not hide it with horrible lighting and bad camera tricks. Which, unfortunately, is what shows up here.
It's not the worst movie ever, and definitely not the worst of the Horrorfest outings for 2007. But it just takes too much time to build up to a delivery that's really not as good a payoff as you'd want it to be. Really, it's just a poor knock-off of 28 Days Later or 28 Weeks Later, replacing zombies with rat-people. It's fun, I suppose, but very slow to build and pretty difficult to track once things start falling apart.
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