Since our first foray into Italian exploitation horror wasn’t what I expected, we’ll reload a bit with another Italian exploitation movie for Rat Week, the infamous Ratman. Sadly, this is not an Italian knockoff of Batman, but a movie that is supposed to be about a rat-monkey(?)-human(??) hybrid creature, creatively referred to as Ratman. I say supposedly because what we’re told the movie is about and what the movie is actually about are two very different things.
After a model does a photoshoot in an undisclosed Caribbean country, she’s stalked and attacked by someone, presumably a Ratman, who leaves her for dead and covered in rats in a slum. When the model’s sister is called in to identify the body, she soon realizes she needs help because the local police force has no interest in investigating the murder, because apparently murders aren’t a serious crime wherever this is. Luckily, she is helped by a true crime writer who is coincidentally on the island looking for inspiration for his next book, and together they try to track down who, or what could have killed her sister.
Time to say the line I’ve been waiting for since we started this: We need to talk about Ratman. Ratman is one of the goofiest looking things I have ever seen, mostly because there is almost no attempt to transform the actor, Nelson de la Rosa, into being a monster. They took a man who may have been the smallest adult on Earth, he was approximately 2 foot 4 inches in height, gave him some fake teeth and said, alright, this is the rat-ape-man hybrid that is a frightening killer. Anyone on the cast could probably take this guy in a fight, which does somewhat hurt the believability of him as a spree killer, but hey, Chucky can do it so why not Mousey(Yes, that’s what the monster is credited as)?
Mousey sounds great, so what’s the problem? To be blunt, he’s barely in his own movie! So much time is spent investigating, talking about stuff, showing the jungle over and over again, while the actual star of the movie is off lurking somewhere. This isn’t Jaws, you’re not building tension by keeping the Ratman off screen, you’re just denying us all what we want, which is more Ratman!
Unfortunately this leaves us in a weird Ratmanless place. If this movie had 300% more Ratman it would be an exploitation classic, because it has everything else a grimy tropical monster movie needs, it’s just missing that final piece that ties everything together. While I can’t recommend watching the full movie, I can definitely recommend going on YouTube and looking up Ratman compilations, because that little guy is wild.