Explosions of atomic bombs forced the surviving men to take refuge underground.
Some of them after a few years returned to the surface, starting a "primitive" life.
In the early 23rd century, a band of bikers, descendants of this faction, arrives in a town where they find a huge abandoned mansion.
Inside is food, water, and many annoying, vicious, and cruel rats.
The film is credited to Vincent Dawn a.k.a. Bruno Mattei but in reality the bulk of the work (not just the screenplay) was done by Claudio Fragasso.
Rats is a deliberately lighthearted, in its own way sympathetic post-atomic that, like many other products of the period, was meant to be easily marketable.
In fact, it still retains that charm from encore cinema which constitutes its nature.
Like many of Fragasso's horror films a contribution of some weight is to be found in Rossella Drudi's typewriter (not even she credited): the ending, successful though a bit phoned in by some earlier dialogue, is unforgettable.
A very artisanal spirit pervades the film's framework, which is full of several gimmicks of a certain weight that always feature the real stars of the film: the mice.
Evil, unrestrained: they fall from above, come from below, penetrate every possible place (like Patrick still lives taught...).
The mice so hated by men are the film's great metaphor, as is space: the high and the low, the underground and the surface, evolution and inferiority.
Only the whole thing is drawn out a little too long: downtime is evident.
The overall acting, moreover, is modest.
The very low budget does not give credit to the swaggering basic ideas.
Rats are the real masters, as zombies are in Romero's films.
There is no shortage of Mattei-like eroticism in the first part of the film.
There are a couple of legends connected or linkable to the film. The most famous is that many lab rats used for the film really escaped through the streets of Rome.
The other is that the actress Geretta is actually a man...
"No problem," the hungry rats would say against humankind. They do not discriminate.
Some good splatter scenes are not lacking, excellent music.
Review by Zick
