Carl Fry and Maxwell Nalevansky’s debut feature Rats! is a bit impossible to describe. There’s a story in there, somewhere, involving nuclear weapons, missing “hans” (hands, but everyone in Pfresno, Texas, uses a Matt Berry-esque affect when pronouncing this word for… some/no reason), delusional cops, a half-naked wannabe news reporter, and a cameo from a pig named Larry. But possessing little of what one could consider a cogent narrative, Rats! instead feels like a gateway into a delirious dimension where everything goes bonkers on 30-second intervals. Nothing is too absurd or too crass for inclusion, and while that brazenness means the end results can be uneven, this quality is also essential to the film’s uniquely chaotic charm.
The film’s protagonist, as it were, is Raphael or “Rafy,” (Luke Wilcox, in his feature film debut and here resembling what one images an 18-year-old Adam Driver would have looked like if he were into Thursday and had Timothee Chalamet’s current mustache), and as the film opens he finds himself in a dreary county jail cell after getting busted for spray-painting the town’s beloved payphone. He is soon released, slapped with community service, and heads to his cousin Mateo’s to crash. But little did Rafy know that his release would act as something of a springboard for the chaos to follow, commencing Rats‘ pinball of madness: plutonium deals go south, a local rapper named Pflophaus drops some of the most questionable bars you’ve ever heard — lines like “I love selling crack” and “Imma live forever like Kobe Bryant” are delivered with alarmingly comparable levels of conviction — and Officer Williams (Danielle Evon Ploeger) busts into situations like a rabid cartoon character, firing off endless threats like “I’m gonna fuck you in the ass with my gun!” (Ploeger is the film’s true scene-stealer, her crazed performance feeling someone already dialed to eleven took an extra bump or two of coke). Meanwhile, Bernadette (Khali McDuff-Sykes), a fellow community service draftee and the object of Rafy’s eye, drifts in and out of the narrative as the lone beacon of relative normalcy — that is, when she’s not talking about eating pineapple on Xanax.
But Rats! is at its absolute weirdest — and best, which isn’t always the case with these things — when it abandons any pretense of coherence and fully leans into its B-horror aesthetic. By the third act, there’s so much gleeful chaos whirring about that you can almost taste the filmmakers’ delight in throwing caution to the wind, and everything else into the blender. The downside to this pursuit of gonzo purity is that you can also sense the limitations of a very raw script fairly regularly; it can feel like a first draft in its weaker moments, as if the creators trusted their deranged inspiration too much to ever revisit any of the wacky particulars and crystallize a more fully-formed vision. The result is a tumble of half-baked and half-brilliant moments that come fast enough to keep things from getting boring or repetitive, but which also prevent viewers from ever truly settling in to soak up the wild spectacle.
Still, for those in the mood for free-flowing, unabashed stupidity punctuated with occasional flashes of pure comedic gold, it will be easy to overlook Rats!‘s flaws. Put differently, it’s an excellent midnight movie candidate: best watched with friends — the more zooted, the better — who appreciate cartoonish violence, aren’t bothered by plot detours, and revel in the kind of stilted, over-the-top acting that can only happen when a director tells their cast, “Go weird or go home.” So while Rats! might not be a cinematic masterpiece, even of the B- variety, there’s a certain scrappy electricity crackling in its veins that makes you want to root for it, warts and all, all the way to its sticky, silly, wickedly satisfying final bloodbath.
DIRECTOR: Carl Fry; CAST: Maxwell Nalevansky, Danielle Evon Ploeger, Luke Wilcox, Darius Autry; DISTRIBUTOR: Yellow Veil Pictures; IN THEATERS: February 28; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 25 min.
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