Salubfoto It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

Zlatica One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

Raymond Sierra The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

Billy Ollie Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

gavin6942 Contaminated grain breeds overgrown, killer rats in this Golden Harvest production. Dachshunds were dressed up as rats for the special effects. That is all you need to know.Exactly how to judge this film is something of a mystery. By no stretch of the imagination is it good in any critical sense. The acting is average, the plot is incomplete, multiple subplots turn up for no reason and never get resolved. The editing is choppy. The special effects are good, even if funny.Horror fans who like their films cheesy will love this. Others might be a bit more let down, as there is something lacking. The gore is glorious, though, and you can never take that away from them.Available now on Blu-Ray from Scream! Factory, with more than a handful of bonus interviews.

Theo Robertson Writer James Herbert was something of a folk hero to people of a certain age . You can praise any writer of literature as much as you want but to be a teenager in the 1980s no book was more enjoyable than one by Herbert . The 1980s was a golden period of horror and much of it was kick started by Herbert's 1974 pulp fiction horror novel THE RATS that launched a whole host of other writers such as Guy N Smith who tried to emulate Herbert's style . Time hasn't been kind to his work because horror nowadays isn't as fashionable as it was once and Herbert's books have a very formulaic , predictable structure where every chapter alternates between one that is vaguely important to the plot followed by another that serves to introduce a character only for them to be killed off at the end of the chapter . There's a lot of truth in what critics say that if you read the even numbered chapters in a Herbert novel you can still follow the plot to a tee and the odd numbered chapters are mere padding . That said if you take his books on their own terms they are rather enjoyably disturbing and entertaining . It does become noticeable that the writer had one eye on the cinema/TV market later and DOMAIN the book that ended his Rats trilogy seems a conscious attempt to pitch his novel to a film company hence the nuclear devastated landscape of London is made more film-able by having many key scenes take place in the pitch blackness of or in mist shrouded day scenes which saves on a potential budget . Apparently the writer was very unhappy about his previous books THE RATS and THE SURVIVOR being translated to screen It seems a bit arrogant of Herbert . Despite bigging up the alleged subtext that THE RATS is supposed to have it's pretty obvious that he wasn't going to win the Nobel prize for literature . Whatever it's faults or merits THE RATS does lend itself very much to cheesy cinematic horror . The screenplay does follow the structure of the novel for the most part with the audience being witnesses to a series of episodic rat attacks and being one step ahead of the main protagonists in the story . There's two problems though . One is that the cinematography is very dark and murky and it's painfully obvious Roger Deakins didn't work on this film but maybe I was just watching a very bad print so should be forgiving . What is less forgivable is the production team trying o get around realising rat attacks on screen . Some of the close ups see animatronics used which are serviceable but for medium and long shots the production team use dachshunds made up to resemble rats . They're made up very badly I hasten to add and the effect is often laughable and even if you didn't know they were sausage dogs you're painfully aware that they're not rats either . Well let's be somewhat charitable and say there is an element of fun to all this as people are eaten alive by the dachshunds and stops the film from having a cynical mean spiritedness

PeterMitchell-506-564364 We've had over sized alligators, flying piranha's, over sized killer ants, blood hungry rot weillers, and so on. Now we've got giant rats really sinking their teeth into their victims, in some quite bloody scenes, one sadly involving a toddler which I thought was a bit too much. This film basically borrows the same plot of Empire Of The Ants, as the cause to how these rats became giant frenzied killers. Hunky science teacher, Groom, the object of one student's (Langois) affections, works with and becomes romantically involved with a health inspector (Botsford) to get to the core of the rat problem. When employee Scatman Crothers tells Botsford he saw a rat about three feet big, she at first, doesn't believe him. It takes his death to instigate her into action. Groom and her share a little their own action off the playing field, in one quite erotic scene, amidst the madness of these killer vermin. Langois is a sight, though. This is how bad her crush is, she actually lets herself into Groom's bedroom, the son mentioning this to him when he comes through the house, where upstairs is a really nice surprise, waiting for him. It's hard to hold back, especially when she bends over in panties and a short shirt. But near the end, her crush subsides as she gets back with her ex, where they make a mistake of going to the movies. Rats isn't anything special. One would say it has a limited quality about it in terms of story where they should of gone more into the history of these killer rats. One feels too it may of spent a little too much time in Groom's romantic life. How's this? Like Langois catches Groom in the boys changerooms naked, Botsford catches Langois and Groom in the bedroom, but still takes Groom's son out to the zoo. Groom, an interesting actor I've found in what little he's done, provides some funny moments, one of the few assets to this well shot average horror.

stompy Yeah the movie sucks but we had a great time making it. I got thrown through a glass window, hurled down a flight of stairs, and had dog food and corn syrup plastered on my face so the dogs would "eat" me...I gotta tell ya, the dogs were treated like kings. Each dog could only work 2 hours and they could only shoot for 5 minutes at a time. They all had air conditioned kennels.The humans on the other hand... well we just had to fend for ourselves...George "Stompy" Hollo