Crew
Director – Anthony Ascot [Giuliano Carnimeo], Screenplay – David Parker Jr. [Dardano Sacchetti], Producer – Fabrizio De Angelis, Photography – Robert Garder [Roberto Girometti], Music – Stefano Mainetti. Production Company – Fulvia Film srl.
Cast
David Warbeck (Fred Williams), Janet Agren (Terry), Eva Grimaldi (Marilyn), Werner Pochath (Mark), Luisa Menon (Peggy), Pepito Guerra (Dr Olman), Nelson de la Rosa (Mousey), Franklin Dominguez (Inspector Lopez), Anna Silvia Grullon (Monique)
Plot
The fashion photographer Mark is in the Caribbean on a shoot with several models. One of the girls Marilyn is attacked. Terry flies in after learning that Marilyn, her sister, has been killed. She meets the mystery writer Fred Williams at the airport and he accompanies her to the morgue. It proves to be a case of mistaken identity and Terry finds that Marilyn is actually alive and at a shoot in the jungle. She and Fred set out to find Marilyn and the others. They however are at an abandoned village where they are stalked and killed by a vicious rat-monkey hybrid that has been created by a scientist.
Italian exploitation cinema of the 1960s through to the 1980s was an amazing era. (See Italian Cinema). Filmmakers would fairly much take any moderate success in the US mainstream and generate dozens of copies as with the likes of Spaghetti Western, the 1960s spy movie, the 1970s exorcism film, the zombie film and the Mad Max styled post-apocalyptic action film during the 1980s. In this case, you get the feeling with Rat Man that somebody decided to conduct a copy of Sondra Locke’s Ratboy (1986), even though that film was not a success. Ratboy was more of a fable, whereas here it feels as though the Italians have fed the basics through the 1980s fad for splatter and gore.
Rat Man is not particularly poorly made, it is more a case of being a film where nothing much happens. It is halfway into the film and the Rat Man appears only once and there is one death, plus one dead body discovered. Certainly, things do pick up after that point and there are a number of occasionally gory deaths. Even then, the film still feels thinly plotted and the slim premise padded.
The film’s most unique feature is the casting of Nelson de la Rosa as the Rat Man. de la Rosa (1968-2006) hailed from the Dominican Republic and stood only 2’4¼” tall. This had him first cast in the Italian action film Cross Mission (1988) and then as Rat Man. His greatest claim to fame was appearing in The Island of Dr Moreau (1996).
Behind the pseudonym of Anthony Ascot was Giuliano Carnimeo (1932-2016), an Italian director who was a prolific maker of Spaghetti Westerns during the 1960s and 70s and then a string of comedies in the 1970s. Carnimeo made only a few other films of genre note, including a venture into the giallo film with The Case of the Bloody Iris/What Are Those Strange Drops of Blood Doing on Jennifer’s Body? (1972), the post-holocaust action film The Exterminators of the Year 3000 (1983) and the sf film Computron 22 (1988).
Trailer here