My friend and I picked up Killer Rats from the bargain bin in the hopes that it would be one of my favorite kind of movies: the so-bad-that-it's-good trash fest. Unfortunately, Killer Rats entirely fails to deliver. It's bad, but not bad enough to laugh at, and ends up coming off as just boring.
Let's start with what the movie does right. The acting, sets, and special effects in Killer Rats are surprisingly good for a movie of its caliber. Don't get me wrong, they're all pretty lame, but they're a few steps up from rock bottom. This is about the best compliment I could give the movie. Ironically, this makes the movie less entertaining; the production values never quite reach the "laughably bad" level - instead they hover somewhere between "mediocre" and "lame."
Killer Rats does a whole lot of things wrong. The biggest problem is that it's just really boring. Every time it looks like a plot is about to develop, it stalls out. The first 75 minutes of the movie are dull and plodding, and the movie never really manages to go anywhere. It's pretty much just a bunch of mundane incidents in a rehab facility with a few halfway-decent death scenes thrown in for good measure. There is never any interesting/funny/witty dialogue. The final 15 minutes get a little more interesting, but the final fight is still pretty boring.
For the life of me, I can't figure out what Ron Perlman is doing in Killer Rats. I bought this movie in large part because he's in it, but the script gives him NOTHING to work with. He plays an uninteresting, buttoned-down doctor, the sort that a movie with an even lower budget might have given to a random geriatric actor. I kept expecting him to relive some old war memories or become a badass, but he never did. At one point it looks like there is some tension developing in his character, but then it goes nowhere. If you see this movie hoping to get some cheesy-yet-satisfying Ron Perlman action, you WILL be disappointed.
The Bottom Line: Killer Rats is not anywhere near good enough to stand on its own merits, and never gets truly bad enough for the so-bad-that-it's-good vibe. Boring, not worth seeing.
Let's start with what the movie does right. The acting, sets, and special effects in Killer Rats are surprisingly good for a movie of its caliber. Don't get me wrong, they're all pretty lame, but they're a few steps up from rock bottom. This is about the best compliment I could give the movie. Ironically, this makes the movie less entertaining; the production values never quite reach the "laughably bad" level - instead they hover somewhere between "mediocre" and "lame."
Killer Rats does a whole lot of things wrong. The biggest problem is that it's just really boring. Every time it looks like a plot is about to develop, it stalls out. The first 75 minutes of the movie are dull and plodding, and the movie never really manages to go anywhere. It's pretty much just a bunch of mundane incidents in a rehab facility with a few halfway-decent death scenes thrown in for good measure. There is never any interesting/funny/witty dialogue. The final 15 minutes get a little more interesting, but the final fight is still pretty boring.
For the life of me, I can't figure out what Ron Perlman is doing in Killer Rats. I bought this movie in large part because he's in it, but the script gives him NOTHING to work with. He plays an uninteresting, buttoned-down doctor, the sort that a movie with an even lower budget might have given to a random geriatric actor. I kept expecting him to relive some old war memories or become a badass, but he never did. At one point it looks like there is some tension developing in his character, but then it goes nowhere. If you see this movie hoping to get some cheesy-yet-satisfying Ron Perlman action, you WILL be disappointed.
The Bottom Line: Killer Rats is not anywhere near good enough to stand on its own merits, and never gets truly bad enough for the so-bad-that-it's-good vibe. Boring, not worth seeing.