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Rat Man
[Blu-ray]
Blu-ray ALL - America - Cauldron Films Review written by and copyright: Eric Cotenas (5th August 2024). |
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The Film
 Long dismissed as a crackpot, Professor Olman (The Overthrow's Pepito Guerra) has been hidden away in the Carribean doing genetic experiments and what he hopes will make him famous is "Mousy" (The Island of Dr. Moreau's Nelson de la Rosa), the product of introducing the sperm of a rat into the ovum of a monkey, resulting in a pint-sized creature with extremely venomous claws and a hankering for human flesh. No sooner is the professor set to take Mousy with him to the Scientific Congress in Europe than his assistant accidentally leaves Mousy's cage unlocked and he is out on the rampage. His first victim is discovered by model Marilyn (Black Cobra's Eva Grimaldi) while doing a shoot on the beach with photographer Mark (Bloodlust's Werner Pochath) and fellow model Peggy (Luisa Menon). Mark does not want any bother from foreign police so Marilyn and Peggy agree not to get involved, particularly since Peggy is heading back home to the states the next day. That night Peggy goes out and winds up stranded in the bad side of town when her taxi blows a tire. Fleeing a knife-wielding weirdo, she just happens to hide out in the temporary lair of Mousy who tears her to shreds. Upon being contacted by Inspector Lopez (Cobra Mission 2's Franklin Dominguez) to identify her sister's body, Terry (City of the Living Dead's Janet Agren) arrives from New York and shares a cab with mystery writer Fred (Twins of Evil's David Warbeck) on the way to the morgue where she discovers that the body is not that of her sister Marilyn who was misidentified because she went out with Marilyn's dress and matching purse. When they contact the hotel, they discover that Mark, Marilyn, and his assistant Monique (Cobra Mission's Ana Silvia Gruyllon) left three days ago to look for photo shoot backdrops in the jungle. Terry is relieved to learn that her sister is alive but Fred smells a mystery which gives him the excuse to tag along as they try to track Marilyn's whereabouts. Meanwhile Marilyn, Mark, and Monique have come across another of Mousy's victims and fled deeper into the jungle with the creature in pursuit. One of a glut of variable mid-to-late eighties from former Lucio Fulci producer Fabrizio de Angelis – some of which he directed under the name "Larry Ludman" like the Killer Crocodile and Karate Warrior films franchises – Rat Man is so bottom-of-the-barrel that it makes Paganini Horror seem slick by comparison. Scripted by a slumming Dardano Sachetti (Devilfish) and directed by jobbing Giuliano Carnimeo – worlds away from the Sartana spaghetti westerns or even the one-off giallo The Case of the Bloody Iris – Rat Man is too lazy to even feel tasteless. Mousy seems to be anywhere convenient without any indication as to how he got to the city to kill the first victim, why he happened to be in Peggy's hiding place or how he got to other places before Mark and Marilyn to leave bodies to be discovered or to wage attacks in the village of San Marin where Mark, Marilyn, and Monique stop off in search of help – a village that seems to have turned into a derelict and dusty ghost town as quickly as the Greek island of Anthropophagus following Mousy's escape – and then how or why he happens to be back at the professor's house where Mark and Marilyn eventually wind up. Mousy pops up from rucksacks, refrigerators, and toilets to claw victims to death who probably could stomp him quite easily if they were remotely intelligent; then again, Grimaldi's quick shower to wash way blood drops from a discovered corpse becomes a glamorous self-gropefest. Warbeck and Agren do noting but drive and talk, never really being in any danger themselves, and turning up to the climax so late that their angles were probably shot at a different time from everything else. They are even offscreen for the "surprise ending" which should be hilarious but is just dumb. The film looks grubby and it is obvious it is budgetary and not by design with grainy Telecolor photography by Roberto Girometti (Witch Story) with the odd attractive shot or striking composition here and there while the synth scoring of Stefano Mainetti (Zombi 3) has a lot of the same KORG samples of his Italian eighties low-budget genre contemporary Carlo Maria Cordio (Killing Birds), and the fascination with owning a remastered Blu-ray of Rat Man can only be described as perverse. 
Video
Unreleased theatrically or on home video in the United States, Rat Man was most accessible as an English-dubbed, Japanese-subtitled VHS tape from the Albatros label until British label Shameless Screen Entertainment put out a DVD in 2008. While anamorphic, the transfer looked no better than the VHS edition, as was probably the case with the earlier Austrian and German editions from the same master. Cauldron Films debuted a new 4K scan of the original camera negative last year as a limited edition Blu-ray/CD soundtrack edition once exclusively available from DiabolikDVD but now sold out. Their standard edition drops the soundtrack, but the 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.66:1 widescreen Blu-ray reveals the transfer at its best with all of its rough edges intact. Well-lit scenes look relatively clean and a couple close-ups of Agren, Grimaldi, and Menon look as glamorous as anything in eighties Italian softcore erotica while some of the location work just looks grainy and dirty unless there is sufficient natural light (presumably the ghost town scenes were actually shot on Italian sound stages or Roman location as they look better than the surrounding material). The transfer will more than satisfy viewers curious about how this film was meant to look, although even if it had been picked up in the U.S. or U.K. at the time it would have been direct-to-video. 
Audio
The only feature audio option is an English DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono track of a film acted in English but not post-synched by any of the English-speaking talent including Warbeck. The vocals sound fine as does the effects and music tracks but even Mousy at the height of his dubbed screeching is not going to test your system. Optional English SDH subtitles are also included. 
Extras
Extras start off with an audio commentary by film historians Eugenio Ercolani, Troy Howarth, and Nathaniel Thompson who are understandably stupefied at the opportunity to do a commentary for a remastered Blu-ray of Rat Man. Ecrolani sheds light on the career of producer de Angelis who started out as production manager for Luciano Martino and later Joe D'Amato before becoming a producer with his Fulci films the highlight of his career quickly followed by his eighties output as producer and director that made him – as the others describe – the last bastion for a lot of the older filmmakers like Carnimeo who were jobbing in the eighties (in contrast to the likes of Dario Argento and D'Amato who were mining younger talent). Ercolani also reveals that such older directors not only helmed films for him but did second unit, uncredited scripts – with Umberto Lenzi penning some of the Karate Warrior sequels using his wife's name as a pseudonym – and pre-production work on them as was the case with Alberto de Martino (The Antichrist) for this film; indeed, Ercolani reveals that it was de Martino who ridiculed Sachetti's concept as "Jaws but just a fin" leading to the addition in voiceover about venomous claws that can kill in seconds (which is not born out by any of the protracted attacks). Ercolani also reveals that he had interviewed Carnimeo who had grown bitter with the business and refused to talk about most of his films, even the ones he liked. Howarth and Thompson speculate on whether Fulci might have been considered for the film had he a) not alienated a lot of the people he worked with during this period, and b) was not in increasingly poor health. They also discuss some of the faults of the film, including the fact that neither Warbeck's nor Agren's characters influence the plot in any way, casting Pochath as a relatively normal guy, and the ending – likened to the denouement of City of the Living Dead in so much as both ran out of money to realize the apocalyptic implications – while also trying to highlight what works in a "for what it is" sense.  In "Lighting the Rat Man" (16:24), cinematographer Girometti discusses his beginnings shooting Italian newsreels, working under Claude Renoir on Barbarella and The Adventurers, working on Ruggero Deodato's Zenabel, getting to photograph Roberto Rossellini's Intervista a Salvador Allende: La forza e la ragione, and working for de Angelis who he unfavorably nicknamed "The Cobra". He provides some vague anecdotes and opinions about Rat Man but more about lighting Witch Story (which recently made its way to 4K UltraHD/Blu-ray). In "Framing the Rat Man" (17:21), camera operator Federico Del Zoppo (Fallo) recalls getting into camerawork through camera maintenance and his fascination with the apparatus, his prestigious credits as an operator, and is no more complimentary about de Angelis than Girometti, nor about Carnimeo who he describes as a a craftsman but "not a director." "Just a Fin" (6:35) is an audio interview with post-production consultant de Martino focusing on his eighties work, noting the anecdote about the fault in Sacchetti's concept of the monster, the challenges of working with Michael Moriarty on Blood Link, a funny anecdote about shooting an exterior scene in New York for Formula for a Murder, and leaving the production of Miami Golem early, ending his relationship with de Angelis. 
Packaging
The standard edition only features a reversible cover.
Overall
One of a glut of mid-to-late eighties productions from Lucio Fulci-producer Fabrizio de Angelis, Rat Man is bottom-of-the-barrel that the fascination with owning a remastered Blu-ray of it can only be described as perverse.
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