Speaking of rats, one of the (and definitely my favorite) perks of working at a video store is free promo tapes. I was originally going to do Razorback or maybe Al Adamson’s Brain Damage this week, but when I got to work last Thursday, this here movie was sitting on the counter with a note that it was for me taped to it. They love me. Everyone loves me. But rats are terrorists because they ate the power lines to the Statue of Liberty. Smell that? It’s chloroform and camel piss. Your eyes are getting sleepy. You’re slipping into review land. Just let the power take you. HEY! STOP WAKING UP! "That’s it. Deeper. Deeper." Sorry, that had nothing to do with dreaming. That was Malorie talking to me.

Anyway, rats eating the power lines for the Statue of Liberty. Now we’re back on track. And on the tracks is a girl in a dressing room at a large and made up department store, Garson’s. She reaches for her shirt and gets chomped by a big ol’ rat. Elsewhere, Susan Costello, the PR woman for the store, is showing a foreign queen around the store. When Susan speaks to her in her own language, it sounds sort of Italiany, but when the woman shows that she can speak English, it’s with an upper-class British accent. Apparently she took language lessons from John Cleese. Susan is called away to deal with rat bite girl. She gives her a free outfit and sends her on her way, claiming the wound was from a carpet tack.

That night, after bringing her daughter Amy home from swimming lessons, Susan sees a huge rat perching outside the window of their apartment. She calls the landlord, who promises to dig a few traps out of his greasy, porn-filled store room and set them around the window. Uh, why is that his duty? Can’t you buy rat-traps in New York? When the landlord gets back to his place, he tries to feed the big rat from Susan’s apartment, which appears through a hole in his wall. When it bites him, he attacks it with a baseball bat. Retaliation is swift and furry. The man is covered in a swarm of rats, which all immediately die of cholesterol poisoning.

The next day, Susan goes to visit rat bite girl in the hospital. She’s severely sick, skin falling off her face. She has contracted Wheel’s disease, and the thing that bit her was definitely not a carpet tack. Big boss lady tells Susan to get someone to take care of their little problem. She calls in John Carter, a roguish looking everyman who drives a sweet old Mustang. He checks out the dressing room and finds the rat hole. He investigates with his fiber optic drain snake device and sees a rat highway. I’m not going to make any anal probe jokes, you can make up your own. You’re clever little kiddies. John brings in his sidekick, Ty the Token Black Guy, and they go over the store with UV lamps that allow them to see rat piss. The store is floating in the stuff, and they want to close it down, but big boss lady has "Jaws Syndrome" and doesn’t want to close the store.

While Susan, Jack and Ty are swimming in rat piss, Amy is swimming with her aunt Elisa. The rats, apparently big fans of Food of the Gods 2, invade the pool. Unfortunately, no yard monsters are eaten in the process and everyone is evacuated safely. Susan and Jack decide they need to go into the basement of the store to get to the source of the problem when she gets a call about her daughter’s traumatic night swimming with vermin. She asks Carver to come back to her apartment with her to make sure the place is safe. He sets about hunting the rat that was outside their window, and pulls a Duane Dibbley, sending pots and pans tumbling onto his head. Komedy!

The next day Jack and Susan go see Jack’s old friend Ray, whonow [Ferox: ancient Japanese toilet paper company] works for NYC’s Health Department. There’s a big media cover up of the pool incident. As they walk into the H.D. office, Ray tells Jack they can’t close the store or the people would freak out. "You yell vole, people go ‘Huh? What?’ You yell rat, we’ve got a panic on our hands on the Fourth of July."

Susan tells Jack she thinks the rats are getting into Garson’s via an old security room in the basement. They find mucho evidence of rat nesting, and Ty says something about fires "of unknown origin." Peter Weller’s ears are burning. They find an old tunnel and end up in a labyrinth. Apparently every building in New York has miles of old railway and sewer tunnels attached to it. The rats cause the tunnel to collapse, and they narrowly escape. Once they’re out, Susan tells Jack that big boss lady won’t let them close the store to kill the rats. After Jack leaves, she gets trapped in her car and is attacked by a stagehand with one of those little bitey-head-on-a-stick things with fur glued to it. I mean a rat, she’s attacked by a RAT!

Ty’s connections at a research lab lead to them discovering that the rats have been genetically altered. While Ty’s surfing for animal porn, Susan pays a visit to rat bite girl. It’s nice to see such a minor character followed up on later in the movie. It’s good to know the writers care about their characters. Jack meets her at the hospital, and they go to break into Techworth Labs, where they‘ve traced the rats to. They discover the remains of many animals and files about how the rats were test subjects for the medical value of some rainforest plants.

Jack once again appeals Ray to allow him to use the Health Department’s equipment to fight the rats, who he fears could breed an army of super-rats. Jack comes away with one remote control camera robot, which they send into the sewers. What they find is a giant colony of rats. When the camera backs into a bare wire and grounds it to the pipes, the rats are driven into a frenzy. They swarm into the subway, attacking the car that Susan and Amy are riding home in. Susan, flipping through the lab documents, discovers that one of the plants used on the rats is also used in a line of Garson’s perfume. Amy drops her bottle of it, and the rats flood into the car. Someone fails to loosen their sphincter and becomes a rush hour Rambo, firing a large handgun in an enclosed and echo-inducing space. Once everyone’s ears stop bleeding, the escape is fairly successful with minimal casualties.

Jack brews a Pied Piper style plan to lure the rats into the pool using the perfume. They smother the camera ‘bot (magically not completely fried from its encounter with a power line containing enough juice to electrify several city blocks worth of sewer) with perfume and lead the rats to the pool, which has been drained of water and covered with perfume. In a scene completely eradicating any iota of credibility the movie had left, the rats BLAST OUT OF THE DRAINS IN EIGHT-FOOT RODENT FOUNTAINS!!! It’s so silly it’s damn near surreal to see a geyser of tiny grey bodies flying into the air. Susan falls into the pool, but Jack pulls her out, and they set off the claymores they planted in the pool. Big boom, no more rats.

Once they’ve healed from the nine billion different diseases contracted from the bites they suffered, Jack and Susan, along with Amy, are taking a walk in the park. Everything seems to be peachy keen when…RATS! Wow, what a shock that was to my unsuspecting brain. It was only slightly less surprising than the time I found grease on my Big Mac.

I expected nothing but suck and was pleasantly surprised. For a made for TV movie, it wasn't too bad. The CGI was minimal and what was used was kept primarily in the shadows so you couldn't tell that it looked like ass. The characters were likeable if a little pre-fabricated, and there were some genuinely cool moments, like the rat fountains. I would have liked to see a follow up on rat bite girl since we were re-introduced to her halfway through the movie and then she was promptly forgotten about. Not something you'd want to beg your girlfriend to watch with you to introduce her to b-movies, but a pleasant distraction that you can watch by yourself and not fall asleep.