[Mulberry Street]
Plot:A viral outbreak in Manhattan causes people to mutate into bloodthirsty rat creatures. Now...six recently evicted tenants must survive the night against this new and deadly threat. .

Cast:Debbie Rochon, Nick Damici, Kim Blair, Tim House, Ron Brice, Larry Fleischman, Lou Torres, Bo Corre, Javier Picayo, Antone Pagan, John Hoyt, John Gamborini, Larry Fessenden, Catherine Zambri, Mitchell Riggs, Laurel Astri, Rodney Gray. .

My Thoughts:Eh.

Review:I was pretty excited for this movie, even being a New Yorker. A film about humanoid rodent creatures wreaking havoc on the populous of New York City doesn't come along very often. "Mulberry Street" however doesn't deliver, filling up too much time with chatter and not enough time with it's monsters. The movie deals with a viral outbreak which gets picked up by rats underground, and spread above ground to humans. Normally, in a situation like this, it wouldn't be that big of an epidemic considering rodents try to avoid humans as much as possible normally. But the virus has made these rats aggresive, er go...they soon begin attacking people and pretty soon the plague is all over the place.

Jim Mickle's film does an excellent job of building up to the chaos and terror which is soon to ensue, by focusing on a few New Yorkers living in a run down tenement building. But the characters are so uninteresting and lackluster that I was just sitting here waiting for someone to bring on the rats already. We get a boxer who's too old to box anymore, a Polish single mother, a black guy who may or may not be gay, and an old guy who's got 1 and a half feet in the grave.

This is where Mickle's film goes wrong, as everyone knows when building up to a point in your movie where a reign of terror is soon to follow...you need to have intriguing and likeable characters who the viewers can like, get attached to, and cheer for later on. But these people just flat out suck. I really didn't care for any of them, the boxer guy was the only decent character in the movie. Everyone else was either under-developed, annoying, or just not charasmatic enough to be worth watching. Of course because the characters were quite bad, this hurt the acting in the film tremendously.

I wondered why Debbie Rochon was relegated to playing just a newscaster reporting on the growing plague in this movie when lesser actors were busy playing the main characters. I mean where's role reversal when you need it? The film only gets good when the rat plague spreads so far that it's not safe to be on the streets anymore. Mickle does an excellent job of filming the chaos, panic, and madness scenes to the point where they're very believeable. You really think all hell has broken loose in Manhattan, and everyone is screwed at the hands of the humanoid-rat creatures on the loose.

The creatures themselves are pretty well done as well, and Mickle makes sure to give them a creepy effect by making them look, act, and kill like rats. The fact that the kills are good and bloody gives the film a bit of a lift as well. And truthfully there's nothing creepier than rat-faced humans nipping at your heels. The chase sequences are brilliant, and scary in many ways. And the verocity of the creatures makes you feel atleast some slight pity for the characters, even if they are for the most part...boring and not fun to watch. "Mulberry Street" is a film that has much potential but only uses some of it. In the end, it comes up half empty.

Positives:Good creature fx, great directing during the "citywide panic" scenes, entertaining chase scenes. .

Negatives:Uninteresting characters, and Mickle takes too long to introduce his monsters.

Overall:Not what it could've been.





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