 |
| Credits |
Director: Giuliano Carnimeo
Starring: David Warbeck, Janet Agren, Eva Grimaldi, Luisa Menon
Screenplay: Dardano Sacchetti
Country: Italy |
| External Links |
|
Sometimes, being a B movie fan is like trying to find your wife's wedding ring after she dropped it in a septic tank: you have to wade through a lot of shit to find a gem. Discovering that gem is a treat, but generally you'll find yourself with a large handful of excrement. Unfortunately, Ratman is not a gem, but instead one of those piles of shit one more than often finds, and not just any piece of excrement either. No, Ratman is a steaming fresh pile of peanut-encrusted beer bog.
Yep, it's that bad.
Ratman, also know in Italian as Quella Villa in Fondo al Parco (The Village by the Park? Something like that) was directed by Giuliano Carnimeo, who also directed The Case of the Bloody Iris, and is written by Dardarno Sacchetti who gave us Lucio Fulci's The Beyond, City of the Living Dead and House by the Cemetery, along with many other classics of Italian horror. Honestly, I don't know what either of them was thinking when they made this - and that goes for star David Warbeck as well. Surely times never got that lean!!
Set on a small island, Ratman starts with a professor proudly proclaiming that he should win the Nobel Prize for science after he creates a monster he calls 'Mousey' (played by tiny actor Nelson De La Rosa. Seriously, this guy is so small even Verne Troyer could pick on him), a rat/monkey hybrid. The problem with Mousey is that he has also developed poisonous teeth and claws, which will kill a man in no time at all.
Of course, Mousey escapes and starts a half pint reign of terror!
Mousey starts by killing a model, and her sister is called to the island to identify the body. Upon arrival she meets an author, and they soon become chums and visit the morgue together only to find the girl is not her sister, and that her sister has actually made a trip into the forest on another photo shoot, and the two choose to investigate… but what they find is a trail of death!!!!!
I really can't stress enough what a piece of crap this film is, and its directorial and writing genealogy, with Sacchetti and Warbeck's involvement specifically, makes it even more disappointing.
One last substandard factor of this film is the shower scene. The girl who performs it has a fantastic body, but her eyebrows look like the offspring of Brooke Shield's and Groucho Mark's eyebrows! Seriously, Bob Hawke would look at these things a insist of cutting them back, though they are so bushy that may need council permission. |
