Hey, first film is down!
Mulberry Street (2006)One day, rats in Manhattan suddenly turn fiercely aggressive, and they now transmit a plague which infects the bitten and mutates them into violent rat-human hybrids. The residents of one condemned tenement building on the island are now trapped, struggling to deal with the growing horror and the crumbling building they're all being evicted from.
Here's a fun question: can a horror film made for $60,000 actually manage to be an effective piece of cinema? Nick Damici and Jim Mickle prove in this microbudget movie that yes, a solid script with believable, realistic characters can in fact do exactly that. Jim directs Nick as he plays an aging former boxer known as Clutch, who is waiting for his wounded soldier daughter Casey to return home. But in the meantime he's busy dealing with the potential of dating a neighbor, Kay, talking to the two old guys upstairs, or spending time with his best friend, a flamboyant black man known as Coco. It's the little things in their lives that make them seem believable, like Kay struggling with her groceries, Coco potentially dealing with his own feelings for Clutch, or the elderly Frank and Charlie dealing with their bad hearing and need for oxygen while bantering constantly. The building feels dilapidated, but more importantly, it feels lived in.
I was thinking this year about possible themes and elements that I've seen recurring, and the truth is, rat movies had actually popped into my head for some reason, so this ended up fitting the bill. There is a small pantheon of these kinds of flicks, including the likes of Willard (original and remake), sequel Ben, post-apocalyptic Rats: Night of Terror, made-for-TV-movie The Rats, and the great Peter Weller vehicle Of Unknown Origin. Yeah, even further defining killer animal movies into animal-specific categories, you can come across some weird and cool stuff.
Prfsnl, you asked for some attention to obscure films on a streaming service. Well, here you go. This movie is streaming for free on Amazon Prime. While you can see the limitations in the budget (the few instances of special effects are blatantly awful), that money went to making sure the script was shipshape and the talent was well worth it. It's not the greatest microbudget film I've ever seen; that's reserved for the stupidly amazing The Head Hunter. Yet it's one of the earliest from the Damici/Mickle combo, which has given us Stake Land, We Are What We Are, and the Hap & Leonard series, along with Damici's work in films like the geriatric werewolf movie Late Phases.
