The villains of this lurid horror movie are “very sophisticated and diabolically clever”. So says Ed Sheehan, cigar-chomping elder statesman of the extermination business. And he should know. He has spent 48 years of his life on the front line of the battle against one of mankind’s most resourceful enemies: the rat.
Employing every grisly gross-out tactic in the film-maker’s lexicon, with this stomach-turning shock-doc, director Morgan Spurlock ensures that indifference to the world’s least favourite sewer-dwelling trash-eater is not an option. A title font that looks as though it was lifted from a James Herbert novel sets the tone, along with Psycho-style screeching stabs on the score and almost subliminal flashes of yellowed rodent teeth lunging towards the camera. This is not a measured, balanced examination of the natural history of rats. This is a Pandora’s box of cheap tricks: think images drenched in a blood-red filter, lascivious closeups of thrashing liver parasites and morbidly bloated botfly larvae pulled from the flesh of a recently deceased rodent. Made for the Discovery channel, this is gleefully exploitative in its approach, and as such, it is horribly entertaining.
