Rats! is very much a your-milage-will-vary sort of movie. Writers, directors, and producers Maxwell Nalevansky and Carl Fry’s debut feature film’s blend of satire, gross-out comedy, and social commentary drew comparisons to the filmography of John Waters following its award-winning world premiere at Fantastic Fest in 2024, a comparison that turns out to be an apt starting point for dissecting the movie’s successes and failings. The latter’s nickname, the Pope of Trash, points to his status as a provocateur; his 1972 cult film Pink Flamingos, for example, bears the tagline “An exercise in poor taste.” Shot in the vicinity of Baltimore, Maryland, where Waters and most of his collaborators grew up, the film involves an eclectic cast of characters try to outdo each other in acts of filth, from profanity and violence to acts of animal cruelty, cannibalism, and an infamous finale involving the consumption of dog feces.
Rats! certainly doesn’t venture to such extremes, but many of its scenes— some of which involve vomiting, defecation, pornography, and, again, animal violence— hew closely to the deranged tone of a midnight cult classic in the making. The DIY nature of the filmmaking is in step with Waters’ early films as well. Nalevansky and Fry shot the movie in a little over two weeks in a town near Austin, Texas, where they both grew up. Set in 2007 in Fresno, Texas, Rats! sets its offbeat tone up immediately with a cold open that sees investigators picking apart a crime scene, the latest in a series of killings involving disembodied hands. But all the characters’ hilariously weird pronunciation of the word “hands”— a running gag that’s consistent throughout the film and thankfully never explained— indicates that we’re entering into a heightened reality. After this, we meet our protagonist, Raphael Tinski (Luke Wilcox), as he’s being arrested for painting graffiti on the side of a payphone (a local landmark, as is later, repeatedly explained). He’s let off with community service, but only because the foul-mouthed, likely delusional Officer Williams (Danielle Evon Ploeger) cuts a deal: she wants him to spy on his cousin Mateo (Darius Autry), who she believes owns nuclear weapons he plans to sell to the Taliban.
Accented by a post-hardcore soundtrack, location shooting that grants the environment a specific and tangible sense of place (whether the action is occurring inside a grimy, fly-infested prison cell, a sunny park, or a suburban neighborhood block), disorienting camera angles and framing, and frequently fast edits that match the movie’s hectic pace and tone, Rats! examines late-aughts counterculture through the lens of the one seemingly mostly normal person in a community of lunatics. This ensemble includes, but is not limited to, Raphael’s mother (Elisabeth Joy), who wears a leisure suit emblazoned with the acronym “MILF” and appears scandalized by her son’s supposed transgressive behavior; Raphael’s cellmate Billy (Jacob Wysocki), who pops conversation hearts like they’re crack and talks his ear off about how hot Steve Irwin’s daughter is; an ambitious local newswoman, Shay Burrata (Ariel Ash) and her pushover of a cameraman husband Paul (Brian Villalobos); Pflophaus (Ka5sh), a rapper inexplicably hitting it big with his single “I Like Selling Crack,” the music video for which is a hysterical hodgepodge of wannabe woke internet ephemera; and Williams, who navigates the world with the sort of raunchy, no-holds-barred attitude typically reserved for men, even as the rest of the force voices their disappointment in her failure to live up to the reputation of her lauded father.
At times, Rats! approaches the sweetness more typical of the usual coming-of-age films, via the budding friendship between Raphael and Bernadette (Khali Sykes), who joins him for community service. They’re winning young personalities, united not only by the immediate task at hand, but also by their shared normalcy in a world that is anything but. While inhabiting both the style and position of the stereotypical manic pixie dream girl, Rats! Grants Bernadette active agency in the story, as she and Raphael get drawn into an increasingly convoluted and unbelievable plot that is constantly intruding on them, no matter how hard they try to break free of it. But where Waters’ films weaponized filth to attack the nuclear family and the ideals of American suburbia, Rats! often seems thematically slighter, employing the same sort of setting and character archetypes (albeit with a less cohesive aesthetic) but taking a more scattershot aim that also encompasses everything from the media to law enforcement. It’s crazy for crazy’s sake, which makes for an entertaining time for fans of cult cinema and gross-out humor, but despite all the poop and puke and porn and gore, by the time we reach its explosively gooey finale, it’s blunt edge grows tiresome. Conversely, it’s difficult to satirize insanity in a world whose reality becomes madder with each passing day. I don’t think I ever fully hopped on the film’s hysterical wavelength, as much as I wanted to; I’m the person at the party standing to the side, beverage in hand, watching everybody else dance and chat and have a great time. That isn’t to say that there isn’t an audience out there who will absolutely love the batshit, anarchic energy of Rats!, because there definitely is, and the sense of community and history shared by the cast and crew carries over from behind-the-scenes to shine brightly in front of the camera too. It may be a miss for me, but at least it’s an endearing one.
Rats! opens in theaters on February 28, and will screen locally at the Arkadin Cinema and Bar. It will be available to watch digitally on demand on March 11. Runtime: 85 minutes.
Katie at the Movies 