Ratman

Ratman

Original Title: Quella villa in fondo al parco

Directed by: Guiliano Carnimeo

Italy, 1988

Horror, 82min

Distributed by: Shamless Films

Guliano Carnemo – perhaps most known for the magnificent Giallo Perché quelle strane gocce di sangue sul corpe di Jennifer? (The Strange Case of the Bloody Iris) 1972, get’s to work with Italian Genre cinema royalty, David Warbeck, Janet Agren - well kinda – a sultry Eva Grimaldi, and Nelson de la Rosa, who at the time was the smallest man in the world.

A photo model, is savagely killed by an unknown creature – at least within the movie’s universe, the audience know what it is – leading her sister Terry [Janet Agren] to venture to the same remote island so she can identify the corpse. At the airport trying to grab a cab, she meet’s Fred Williams [David Warbeck], a somewhat assertive writer of mystery novels, who tags along for the ride. At the morgue it turns out that it’s not Terry’s sister Marilyn on the slab after all, she’s taken off to the deep jungle with photographer Mark [Werner Pochath]. So Terry starts to search for her sister with the aid of Fred, but deep in the jungle lurks the Ratman!

The introduction of the tiny antagonist, is shot in a “documentary style” giving a scientific tone to the rats and the rat boy “Mousey” in his cage on the corner of the cellar  … moments later the camera spins around and crash zooms on the now, bust and empty cage. The threat has been set and the creature is on the prowl. But don’t worry, the serious tone is wrecked straight after the credits with a really sappy photo shoot where Eva Grimaldi strikes a few silly poses and flashes some skin for the audience before setting us up for the second shocker of the first act… after all this is an exploitation flick and what better to follow up a deliberate accidental nip slip with the discovery of bloodied skeleton! Ratman does have a kind of cheesy but delightful playfulness to it where it goes from one extreme to the next within the same scene. But it’s what we come for and that’s what makes this movie such a good time.

The narrative lurks on, setting up as something of an investigation plot where Agren several times is lured to the morgue to see the cold flesh of some unfortunate woman who’s fallen victim to the Ratman. Slowly, slowly, the two - who actually have pretty small parts in the movie compared to Grimaldi – start closing in on Marilyn who is out there in the jungle with the littlest, but deadliest threat of them all…

Despite being in the middle of he jungle, Marilyn and photographer Mark manage to find a shack, belonging to Dr Olman [Pepito Guerra], who observant viewers will notice being the doctor from the opening, and possibly keeper of Mousey. Where Marilyn obviously gets her kit off and takes a shower. It’s ironically bang in the middle of the film and in the off-screen space, an eye peeps upon the naked Marilyn…  

Part Island of Dr. Moreau, part Frankenstein, the movie plays along the familiar “don’t play god, or you will pay” device. “Mousey” – which is revealed to be a hybrid of Simian and rodent with a lethal poison without an antidote – is a marvellously paradoxical antagonist, but Nelson de la Rosa does what he can, and at the end of the day, it’s the cult value of Ratman which makes it all work. As per usual, the mad scientist, Dr Olman that is, refuses to let his creature be destroyed – as he believes he’s to be awarded a Noble Prize for his research! Don’t you just love mad scientists – and eventually, as in every good “Modern Prometheus” tale man playing god is often slain by his creation.

Ratman is a charming oddity, and a fine piece of late eighties Italian trash cinema. There’s some scares, there’s some nudity, there’s a pretty original and interesting monster and there’s some great Italian style effects in the shape of grubby gore and cheap puppetry – you just check out Monique’s [Anna Silvia Grullon] death scene, it’s brilliant with the small puppet Mousey hands that claw their way out of the bog. A magic moment to say the least.

Compared to the other classics they penned, I wouldn’t say that Ratman was the best piece of work legendary screenwriter Dardano Sacchetti, and the un-credited Elisia Briganti wrote. But despite being something of a straight up horror movie with a classic monster narrative, there are also a couple of Gialli traits spread throughout the movie. The monster being seen on a photograph early on, if the photographer only had taken the time to blow up the image, we’d have had a full blown homage to Antonioni’s Blow-Up. Gialli aesthetics are noted when Peggy [Louisa Menon] hides away from an unseen assailant grinding a big knife against the wall in an intimidating way as he stalks her. Large areas of the screen are kept in the dark, and flashes of light reflect off the knife. Warbeck, being a “crime novelist” takes on the role of amateur sleuth, and can pinpoint the exact series of events leading up to the first characters death (not counting the peeping tom in the jungle, during the first photo shoot.) I like this playing with other genre traits and it’s a good trick to get the ball rolling before going back into full horror mode.

Although I find it curious as to why the movie is set up with Eva Grimaldi’s Marilyn, the monster is introduced, and then a load of time is wasted on Agren and Warbeck, before returning to a huge portion of the plot focusing on Grimaldi. Agren and Warbeck never really come to any use in the movie, and I would have liked to see them do a lot more than merely bee filler material, then again, Warbeck plays if for real. Never mind what he was playing, Warbeck always played for keeps, and I can never get enough of that.

The movie really takes off after Grimaldi’s exploitation film trait, the obligatory pleasurable shower scene, and the nightmare she endures during the last half of the movie is pure horror, one by one everyone around her is killed by mousey and eventually she has to take him on all by herself. Fred and Terry eventually find Eva and the movie comes to a pretty anticlimactic closure, which leads to a rather cheap and silly last twist, but it will leave you with a smile on your face.

Edited by Fulci regular, Vincenzo Tomassi, and produced by Fabrizio De Angelis – who hadn’t produced a horror flick since Fulci’s Manhattan Baby 1982, and then only ever returned twice again after Ratman - the Sacchetti/Briganti scripted movie has plot holes the size of Mousey. But at the same time this is a movie that is filled with some great images and delightful scenes that will stay with you forever. As the above mentioned toilet attack, you will never forget the freezer scare or the scene where Nelson de la Rosa chases Grimaldi. Wildly psychotronic stuff, the stuff cult legend is made of

Rare titles like this are what make it all worthwhile - if only someone could release Gianfranco Giagni's Il nido del ragno (Spider Labyrinth) 1988 now, that'd be great! Credit has to be given to Shameless Films, not only for carrying a hard to find anywhere else title, but also for the painstaking restoration they have given Ratman. A variation of sources have been used to make this the most complete version of Ratman available, and unlike other hybrid releases, Ratman never looses that much in quality when going from one source material to another, and Warbeck speaks english all the way through, although there's one scene where it's an obvious american dub. Ratman definitely is a testament to the last breathes of the Italian exploitation genres, and one you shouldn’t be missing out on any more!

Panic

Panic
Original title/Aka: Bakterion
Directed by: Tonino Ricci
Italy/Spain, 1982
Horror, 90min

One of my oldest mates here in Stockholm gave me an advanced VCR player some six-seven years back, when he cleared out his warehouse of stuff he’d had in storage since the video racket died out some ten – fifteen years before that. A few weeks ago he found a big cardboard box of old Japanese video tape originals amongst his junk, and invited me to come look at the newly discovered treasure, which I obviously did. I borrowed a bunch of stuff I haven’t seen in ages, or missed the first time around, and again I find myself reflecting other the fact that these old horror flicks, despite how great they look re-mastered, in HD, great clean crisp sound, never really looked better and more enchanting than they did on shoddy video with blurry colours, buzzy sound and grainy images. I’m all for re-mastered re-issues filled to the brim with new interviews and nostalgic retrospect’s, but I can still feel that addiction to VHS like there’ never been S-Video, Laserdisc, VCD, DVD or Blu-ray. It’s an unexplainable kind of magic.

Through a freak accident at a chemical lab, Professor Adams [Roberto Ricci - son of director Tonini] becomes a contagious bloodthirsty monster. Adams colleague and assistant, Jane [Janet Ågren] and Captain Kirk [David Warbeck] are assigned to find out what happened to the professor – as it all starts out as a mystery venture, only the audience know of the monster. But pretty soon the monster is slaying young lovers, roaming the underground sewer system of Newton and spreading panic along his way.

Wasting no time at all, the movie opens with a suggestive shot of some very familiar footage of a place that could be none other than eighties UK. The suggestive footage presents the viewer with an awe of pending threat. Moments later following some shots of Janet Ågren posing with the science props and concluding that there experiment is going wrong, the lab rats are becoming insane and then the genesis of the movies antagonist – Professor Adams - is presented, well at least his boiling, melting blistering face is. The world they live in is established, the monster is presented, the table is set, now let’s rock.

An early attack is used to show the fury and destruction in the monsters wake, when two young lovers get it on inside a small car and get interrupted mid coitus as a disfigured being yanks the bloke out of the car, smashing him into the bonnet before chasing the semi nude chick into a warehouse corner and gutting her. Even the cops are disgusted with the remains when they find her tattered body later on.

If you want to see totally out-dated computer screens, spontaneous nudity punished by violent death, panic in the streets of England – well we never really see it, but they talk about it a lot - and David Warbeck magnificently sneering his way towards yet another pay check, then you will want to check Panic out.

Oh, and I forgot to tell you about a delicate picante minor subplot concerning a perhaps a tad too friendly and sleazy priest [Eugenio Benito] who initially awards the children of the quire with sweets and later is seen walking at night with a flock of them… hiding themselves from the monster they take to locking themselves in the Church… I love the subtle paradox of children hiding from one horror with a one possibly even larger than the monster. Also, you can’t go wrong using children in threatening situations, as it’s one of the most effective tricks in the world. Amusingly I hold a theory that the Spanish genre writers and directors are the filmmakers who predominately use children as a driving force, an emotional tool and a dramatic instrument in their movies. Almost every Spanish flick these past years concerns orphanages, unfortunate children, kiddie ghosts or something that poses threats to children in one way or another – just look at the movies of the Spanish new wave these past years and you’ll see what I’m talking about. So it’s entertaining to see that screenwriters Víctor Andrés Catena and Jaime Comas Gil where aware of that whilst penning this little oddity way back in the day.

Overall this movie get’s somewhat slayed in reviews, but I can only take this as being critique delivered by people who don’t really appreciate the fine art of European exploitation flicks shot on minuscule budget. Panic does have a pretty decent drive forth throughout, split up between three sub plots. The detective plot of Ågren and Warbeck searching for Adams, the horror plot of the Monster on the prowl and the political subplot of Sir Charles (i.e. Government) setting Plan Q in action – A plan that concerns the total destruction of the village of Newton. Several subplots come together rather early on, as we move into act two where Warbeck questions Sir Charles decision of setting Plan Q in action, is ordered to eliminate the contagion and also told that he’s allowed to use his gun. Warbeck never lets his audience down and once the threat is revealed, this movie get’s going. Exposition is over, now let the fun begin. Yeah so it may not be completely logic why the monster kills, or for what reason, certain questions are never answered and the script is kind of all over the place. But at the same time, I’m here for some cheap thrills, a non-intellectual stimuli and a good time with some cheap European trash cinema. Panic delivers by the bucket full up to the rather bland climax. Oh, the monster, Ågren and Warbeck arcs do culminate, but there’s more to follow that…

The grisly effects and fleshy monster makeup by Rino Carboni and Cataldo Galliano do what they are supposed to – for the time effective and no lesser that other effects at the time. The movie keeps Dr. Adams off screen for as long as possible as to build to that inevitable last minute reveal. See, it's not all wrong, there's a lot of stuff working in favor of Panic. Cinematographer Giovanni Bergamini – who also shot Lenzi’s Cannibal Ferox 1981 and several movies for Enzo G Castellari, Quel maledetto treno blindato (The Inglorious Bastards) 1978, amongst them, sets and composes shots in a way that never really sands out. Although take note of the way Fulci regular Vincenzo Tomassi edits the first gore sequences, it’s fascinating, but unfortunately never repeated again in the movie. This is unfortunately as this is a splendid way of getting the most out of a tension reliever! Finally one should say something of Marcello Giombini’s score, as it is pretty neat and get’s the job done, at times it’s catchy, works with the action on screen and does add to the eighties feel of the movie.

According to rumour – or video folklore if you like – the movie was actually shot in 1976 under the name Bakterion, but was deemed so terrible by the producers – kind of unjust if you ask me as there’s certainly worse shite been released that Panic – that it was shelved until the early eighties when hard core gore movies where in demand. Sounds bogus, but an interesting story as there’s a small chance the movie could have been innovative more than a knock off of a knock off, as the movie ends with a somewhat time typical “pending doom prophecy” text-plate to simmer in the audiences minds as they walk away from the movie, much like the ones seen in Bruno Mattei’s Virus (Hell of the Living Dead) 1980, Andrea Bianchi’s Le notti del terrore (Burial Ground : Nights of Terror) 1981 and Umberto Lenzi’s Incubo sulla città contaminate (Nightmare City) 1981 to name a few.

A fun note is that Production designer on the flick, Javier Fernández would later go on to be a highly acclaimed art director and receive Goya nominations for several of the movies he worked on during the mid-late nineties… such as Almodóvar's Kika 1994.

Director, Tonino Ricci – who worked second unit on movies for Mario Bava and both of Lucio Fulci’s White Fang flicks - had a pretty decent run going at the time, under the pseudonym Anthony Richmond, and churned out a fistful of entertaining low budget lookalikes of other successful genre flicks at the time. I can’t really say why this one still is something of a lost movie. It certainly doesn’t move slower than others still being hailed as epic works. The grand formula of Panic is Boy and girl get into some heavy petting, Monster turns up and slays them whilst Warbeck and Åberg look for Professor Adams… who we all know is the monster killing the horny kids and naked chicks. There’s a threat established early on that the small English village is going to be nuked and you don’t really need much more that that to keep a movie alive now do you?