Half rat. Half monkey. It's the littlest monster ever. (Ratman (DVD))

Member Name: hogsflesh

Product:	Ratman (DVD)
Date:	14/09/09 (83 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Surprisingly creepy

Disadvantages: Silly, badly made, too long

A review of the Shameless DVD release. It'll set you back £6 on amazon.

This Italian horror from 1988 has one of the dumbest premises I can think of. A geneticist in (I think) the Dominican Republic creates a hideous monkey/rat hybrid. The diminutive critter soon escapes, and predictably has a taste for human flesh (even more predictably, he seems to prefer the taste of attractive young women). An American fashion model called Marilyn goes missing on a photoshoot, and her sister comes to look for her, helped out by a thriller writer. The bodies pile up and the police are baffled - who can save us from the claws of Ratman?

I get the feeling this film was dreamed up purely as a vehicle for the tiny lead actor, Nelson de la Rosa (he later played Brando's very small sidekick in The Island of Dr Moreau). Only about two feet tall, he's described on the IMDB as the world's smallest actor, and who's to say they're wrong? (He sadly passed away in 2006). He has really stupid looking fake teeth and claws, and appears to be wearing a brown romper suit. But he is quite creepy, at least when he isn't seen close up. Exploitative though it no doubt is, there is something uncanny about an adult human being that small, and even though he obviously isn't very strong or fast in real life, he does manage to pose a decent threat to the human characters.

I really wasn't expecting this to be any good, but at least in some respects it works quite well. It has a pretty decent stab at being scary, and although there's always an edge of silliness to the horror set pieces, there is some nice suspense. The direction is mostly bog-standard, but the way Ratman himself is filmed - done in such a way as to stop us getting too good a look at him, and generally kept in shadows - is quite effective.

The film has the gumption to be quite nasty, although the gore effects are perfunctory. The plot is predictable, and often a bit too dumb. The ending, sadly, is too stupid to work. The set piece where someone is stalked by a murderer and ends up hiding in the same wardrobe as Ratman would be stupid under the best circumstances, but the fact that the murderer had never been mentioned before that scene and is never alluded to again takes it into the realm of insulting. And how does crossing a rat with a monkey result in a creature with powerfully venomous claws and near-human intelligence?

The dialogue is awful - a non-stop string of clichés. The hero and heroine meet while they're trying to hail the same cab, the police tell the crime writer to leave the investigation to the professionals, the scientist believes that his ludicrous creation will win him the Nobel Prize, etc. None of the dialogue is funny (apart from the line "the village people were very frightened", which summoned up entirely the wrong image). It's so generic it could have been lifted randomly from any number of other films.

There are many more problems. Despite being only 80 minutes, there's a hell of a lot of padding (we seem to spend an eternity watching a plane land). The 'jungle' where the model and her photographer go is obviously a park (there are concrete paths!). The incidental music is a bit too much like Airwolf or something (otherwise the only really 80s stuff is Marilyn's outfits and makeup. This feels like it should have been made five to ten years earlier than it was). The film is dubbed appallingly, with garbled, hurried, and seemingly improvised lines trying desperately to vaguely match with the actors' lip movements.

The actors are a mixed bag. Mostly they're apathetic bit players. The hero and heroine are played by David Warbeck and Janet Agren, both Italian exploitation veterans, who are fine, but have the unmistakable air of good actors slumming it in a cheap horror movie. (There's a whole treatise to be written on the ways good actors try to come out of dire films with their dignity intact.)

Marilyn the model is played by Eva Grimaldi, who's very sexy when she isn't plastered in ludicrous make-up that makes her look alike a cross between a drag queen and a clown-porn actress (yes, there is such a thing as clown porn. Google it. Unless you're at work). She's involved in a lot of gratuitous nudity, which is more than welcome. (She has one shower scene in which she moans sexily while washing her arms, for ages. I never knew women in showers do that! The mysteries of woman, eh?)

Anyway, it has plenty of faults. It's cheap and too long and not made that well. But it's much better than I was expecting. If you are indulgent towards such things then this may work for you.

The DVD has quite bad picture quality a lot of the time, but Shameless claim that this is the most complete print (I'm sure they're right), and it doubtless had to be pieced together from various sources. The only extras are a short but pretty good trailer for Ratman, and trailers for some of Shameless' other releases. As ever, the cover annoyed me ("The critter from the shitter", for god's sake - there's one scene where Ratman emerges from a toilet). The blurb on the back also contains a whopping great spoiler, so I'd advise against reading it.

Shameless are putting out an interesting selection of modestly effective, interesting Italian exploitation, which is entirely creditable, and I'll watch for any future releases with interest.

Summary: A daft exploitation effort from Italy