As a low-budget indie comedy shot over a brief period and set on the fringes of suburban American life, Rats! would fit well on a double- or triple-feature with Adam Rehmeier’s Dinner in America or Conner O'Malley and Danny Scharar’s Rap World. I’ll call this new genre “suburban dirtbag fun.”
Directed by the team of Maxwell Nalevansky and Carl Fry, Rats! lands in theaters this week after a festival run and months of roadshow screenings. I couldn’t stop laughing my ass off. Rats! is set in a fictional Texas town called Pfresno, in 2007 at the tail-end of the George W. Bush era. While the presence in one scene of a McCain/Palin sign—anachronistic, in ’07—is the lone direct reference to politics, there’s a lot of paranoia about terrorism and nuclear weapons, but there’s plenty in the film that echoes in the present time. (One of the filmmakers lives in a Texas town called Pflugerville, while the other is from Fresno, so I guess both are inspirations.)
Luke Wilcox stars as Raphael, an aimless young man who’s busted and jailed for spraying graffiti on a phone booth. In addition to community service—rendered in a hilarious scene—Raphael’s asked by the cops to infiltrate the operation of his cousin Mateo (Darius Autry), a small-time drug dealer who law enforcement suspects, wrongly, is smuggling nuclear weapons to the Middle East. (“I read about it on the blogs!,” his mom declares at one point.)
The title mostly refers to aspects of the plot that involve people snitching on one other, but real rats figure in the proceedings too. We’re eventually introduced to a town full of characters, everyone from nosy neighbors to hapless FBI agents to a bimbo-ish aspiring TV reporter whose husband/cameraman can’t stop vomiting. There’s also a psycho in town who’s cutting off people’s hands (pronounced as “hans,” in a joke that goes from funny to tiresome and back around to funny).
And presiding over it all is Williams (Danielle Evon Ploeger), an out-of-control hellraiser who might be the worst-behaved fictional cop since Harvey Keitel in the original Bad Lieutenant. She’s the big breakout here. There’s violence, blood, vomiting, and bathroom carnage of both the traditional and brawl variety, both in the same scene. The film features the best on-screen bathroom fight since Mission: Impossible- Fallout.
There’s a punk sensibility, although there’s heavy metal on the soundtrack, while the film’s most memorable musical number is a period-appropriate music video for a rap song called “I Love Selling Crack.” While it might consist of 85 minutes of relentless chaos, Rats! never takes itself too seriously. This film has the makings of a future cult classic.