Mulberry Street (2006)

Ex-boxer Clutch (Nick Damici) is looking forward to the return home of his daughter Casey (Kim Blair), who has just been discharged from the service. She is having trouble getting there because there have been some rail and subway closures getting into Manhattan, due to escalating incidences of rats attacking people and, following suit, people attacking people.

For the most part New York goes on as normal. The other tenants in Clutch's apartment building are dreading rent increases or possible eviction due to the building being bought by a developer. Clutch's unrequited love interest Kay (Bo Corre) is dealing with her troubled teenage son Otto (Javier Picayo), while superintendent Ross (Tim House) is struggling to keep the building from falling down around all of them. When Ross is bitten by an infected rat, he begins to change in strange ways.

He is not the only one. More reports pour in around Manhattan of people attacking people until finally all hell breaks loose. It turns out anyone bitten by the rats or by the infected become ill with a virus that slowly turns them into giant rats themselves. Casey struggles to get to her father, Clutch tries to get Kay home safely from the restaurant where she works and the other tenants try to survive. All the while New York's governor vacations in Bermuda, the mayor skips town and the federal government seems at a loss of what to do.

This movie easily could have been another rote zombie film or a 28 Days Later clone, but instead manages to be an entertaining low-budget horror film. When it gets to surviving the night it has been done before, but the performances of everyone involved elevates it. It is marred by some horrible modern rock songs and an abrupt and vague ending, but the practical gore effects and the wise decision to spend the money on make-up effects makes this exciting all the way through.

Mulberry Street (2006)
Duration: 84 minutes
Starring: Nick Damici, Kim Blair, Ron Brice, Bo Corre
Director: Jim Mickle

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Lawnmower Man (1992)

Image
Virtual reality has been one of the most hyped, and one of the most disappointing, promises of technology.  While it promotes immersion into a cybernetic world what it really provides are video games with 20-year-old graphics and the occasional bruise when one accidentally hits a closet door.  In the case of The Lawnmower Man  what it is promising is that something with graphics just a little bit better than Dire Straits's "Money for Nothing" video will somehow change the world and alter humanity. It was laughable then and it is laughable now.  The only person not laughing was Stephen King, who demanded that his name be removed from all future advertising for the movie because he never wrote this.  The story, of which a short film was made in the 1980s, involves a man unwittingly hiring a Greek god to mow his lawn and, after said god creates a spectacle, paying for the landscaping with his life.  It's only a few pages and, in my opinion, it is one of King's worst
Read more

Things (1989)

Image
Most of the time when I hear a movie is the worst ever I know that is hyperbole. There are few candidates and I would even say the famous book chronicling the worst movies ever made got it wrong.  Plan 9 from Outer Space is laughably incompetent, but enjoyable.  The worst kind of films are the ones where no joy can be found in the watching experience, for reasons ranging from unlikeable characters to just sheer boredom.  A truly horrible movie is something like  Things.   This is a 1989 direct-to-video horror film from Canada, filmed on 8mm and dubbed once it was completed and the makers realized most of the sound was unusable.  Director Andrew Jordan and writer Barry J. Gillis managed to grab porn star Amber Lynn for an hour to shoot her as a news reporter just so they could put her face on the video box.  Most of the music was done by Gillis, and some of it by a local band called Familiar Strangers.  It was filmed in large part in Andrew Norman's basement, and most of the props w
Read more

The Omen (1976)

Image
A movie does not have to be high art to strike a chord with the public.  The Omen was an attempt by writer David Seltzer to make some money and get a nice trip to the UK.  It just so happened that because of The Exorcist the public was hungry for more movies involving demons and such, and adding a veneer of Catholicism didn't hurt either.  The Vatican's secrets are most likely of more interest to scholars than anyone else, but a religion doesn't hang on over the centuries without creating a bit of mystery.  In this case, Seltzer settled on the Revelation of St. John, the low-fantasy portion of the Bible and, instead of an hilariously named (albeit historically correct) demon named Pazuzu, with The Omen we get the son of Satan himself.  When Robert Thorne (Gregory Peck) is informed that his child has died he visits a priest at the hospital in Rome where his wife is coalescing.  He is given an offer too good to be true: a foundling, whose mother died in childbirth, was born
Read more