Somebody in the English village of Ditchfield is turning the rats loose on purpose. That is the setup of Rise of the Rats, a British creature feature directed by Stephen Roach, and the trailer lays it out in a little under two minutes.
The story follows Kayla Thornhill, a young punk who reluctantly travels to Ditchfield, the rural village where her estranged father grew up. An infestation there drags the community’s violent history into the open, and a figure called the Rat-Man sets a swarm on the place, leaving Kayla to survive it. Grace Gallagher, Adrian Annis and Mark Collier star.
Black Mandala Is Taking It to the American Film Market
Variety reported that Black Mandala and its Red Owl label are carrying the film to the American Film Market as one of eight genre titles. Black Mandala has Rise of the Rats, Landlord, Haunted and The Realm of Eldervin: Gallowmere; Red Owl has The Rules of the Game, Mister Sandman, Saturnalia and The Driftless. No distributor or release date has been set for any of them yet.
Creature features keep turning up from odd corners this month. The trailer for The Fin landed days ago, a Korean picture that turns mutated mermen into disposable labor.
Rats Have a Long Record in British Horror
Rats carry real history in British horror fiction. James Herbert made his name with The Rats in 1974, his first novel, which set a swarm of man-eating rodents loose in East London and ran on through Lair in 1979 and Domain in 1984. The screen has been less kind to it. The one film drawn from the book, Robert Clouse’s 1982 Deadly Eyes, moved the action to Toronto and shot its oversized rodents by dressing dachshunds in rat suits.
Putting a punk outsider in a village with something buried in it is a sturdier frame than the killer-rodent picture usually bothers with, and it gives the swarm something to expose rather than merely something to chew. Ditchfield, on the evidence of the synopsis, has earned what is coming.