Mulberry St (2006)

A splendid-looking little indie horror/thriller/survival film about people in Manhattan being turned into (large, human-shaped) rats when they had been bitten by either an infected rat or a person who had been bitten! The infection’s source is never explained, nor did it need to be really - it just turned up in rats one day!

There was lots of handheld camera work throughout, which was a bit annoying, but the unknown-to-me leads played it pretty well, even injecting a little comedy here and there, and there was some money been thrown at gory special effects.

There was suspense at times and anxiety levels rose as we rooted for the ‘uninfected’ making it through, surviving the onslaught and killing anything that wasn’t. It’s kind of Zombie stuff without the dead coming back to life. Just turning into rats. Big ones! They start to take on the physical characteristics of rats as they devour any meat/flesh that they can find - and kill to create it if there’s none!

The pacing was good, just the right amount of time getting to know our main characters before the chaos, the plotline was off-the-wall bonkers of course, but great fun, dark and grizzly throughout. Clearly the team making this were having great fun, led by writer/director Jim Mickle. Super stuff!