When there’s no more room in the sewers, the rats will walk the Earth. Or so might run the honest tagline of Mulberry Street (aka Zombie Virus on Mulberry Street), one of the selections for the 2007 edition of After Dark’s Horror Fest.
The story focuses on the tenants of a Manhattan apartment building that are about to lose their apartments to make way for upscale development. Before that happens, there’s an unfortunate outbreak that turns people into zombie-like rat mutants. Together, the tenants must face the zombies. Er, rats. Whatever. In other words, it’s a basic zombie siege film, with a rodent twist.
At first the creatures look and act like zombies; later they go all ratty (elongated faces, big incisors, pointy ears) but still love biting the shit out of everyone. It’s a weird twist, and while I appreciate the desire to do something different, it comes off as being different solely for the sake of difference — there’s no real effect on the story, tone or even look of the movie except for the rat makeup near the end.
It’s a symptom of the film’s real issue, which is lack of focus. Weird subplots never get resolved and odd character notes go nowhere. The intent may have been to add depth, but the result is to simply distract from the heart of the film. Despite those issues, it’s a decently paced and quirky, if unremarkable, zombie movie that just ends up feeling a little muddle-headed.
Mulberry Street/US/2006/
Nice review.
I thought this film was OK. Certainly not that great though, so I think I agree with your review. I felt the action scenes got in the way of the reasonably decent tension that was built up, and overall I’d say it was a bit like [REC] Lite.
However the rat man transformation scene was impressively done, reminding me of The Fly (perhaps that was intentional as it was close to a straight rip-off). Also the makeup was not too bad either.
My version has the “Zombie Virus on…” title which was probably more misleading as I expected actual zombies, but hey, I’ve seen much worse films.
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