YMMV / Rats: Night of Terror

• Alternate Character Interpretation:
  • Are the rat people friend or foe? When asked if they are the former, the leader nods and they make no move to harm the survivors; but then they seem to start growling after they unmask themselves. Then again, it might just be their speech.
  • Considering there are two relatively fresh human corpses in the experiment building, it's possible that the remaining humans have somehow allied with the most evolved of the rats against the others.
• Ass Pull: The twist at the end that the team's rescuers are mutated Rat Men is barely foreshadowed and comes so far out left field that it can border on Narm for some viewers.
• Awesome Music: The moody, atmospheric synth score by Luigi Ceccarelli is way better than it rightly should be. For a sample, here's the end theme.
• Narm: The English dub is exceptionally poor, with many of the dub actors' performances (particularly Duke's) coming across as rather lacking in emotion, especially when compared to the original cast's far more animate line delivery. In addition, the dialogue is often placed at the wrong time^note For example, Duke saying, "Drop the guns, Kurt!" before the latter arms himself and some lines are repeated unnecessarily.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • Notably poor Lilith's demise: Groin Attack from a rat...
  • Regardless of their Ass Pull nature, the Rat Men in the twist ending are still unnerving, due to the makeup shaped to crudely look similar to a rat's face but still showing the human eyes of the actor beneath, giving it an Uncanny Valley effect. Some people who caught this movie on late night TV as children have claimed to have gotten freaked out.
• So Bad, It's Good: The bits of characterization and interaction between the characters help keep the movie just interesting enough to watch.
• Special Effect Failure:
  • One scene with a massive swarm of rats bearing down upon our heroes is realized with a bunch of badly-made fake rats going around and around on what seems to be a conveyor belt.
  • It's painfully apparent that whoever the rat wranglers and production people were couldn't get the rats to sit still to be dyed completely another color; in order to get the "creepy" red eye effect, one can clearly see that they applied grey or black dye to white rats (who naturally have red eyes and pink paws/tails), but in several scenes where the rats swarm, you can SEE the white patches where certain rats were not completely dyed and therefore it looks cheap and silly as hell instead of scary.
  • The unmasked rat man looks less like an actual humanoid rat and more like an actor wearing a badly-fitting fur mask.
  • Even with the masks on, you can see perfectly human faces through the eyeholes in several shots.
• Took the Bad Film Seriously: Deus' actor Fausto Lombardi is the only one who doesn't indulge in cartoonish overacting, and as a result, his character seems like the only reliable and likable member of the group.
• Values Dissonance:
  • The fact that the team's sole person of colour is named Chocolate is more than a little cringeworthy nowadays.
  • In addition, the amount of animal cruelty on display is astounding and would not be tolerated in today's societal climate.

---