Rats!
Written and directed by Maxwell Nalevansky and Carl Fry
Starring Danielle Evon Ploeger, Luke Wilcox, Darius Autry, and Khali Sykes
Unrated
Runtime: 1 hour and 25 minutes
In theaters February 28 and available on VOD March 11

by Cleo Tunningley, Staff Writer

Ah, 2007. McCain and Palin campaign billboards loomed over teenagers milling about parking lots in ripped up tights and Invader Zim backpacks. “Live, Laugh, Love” had just started popping up on all the home decor at TJ Maxx. Pills were everywhere, but weed was still super-illegal. The Bush years were coming to a close, and post-hardcore bands were finally achieving mainstream success. This is the milieu of Rats!, a shaggy and manic comedy written and directed by Maxwell Nalevansky and Carl Fry.

We first meet Raphael (Luke Wilcox) as he’s practicing graffiti in a rundown, overgrown parking lot. Rats! excels at capturing just how much of this country is made up of these lots, deserted sprawl, and trash-dotted highways. In the excellent opening credits sequence, Raphael strolls through this wasteland while “Love Rhymes With Hideous Car Wreck” by The Blood Brothers plays on the soundtrack. The stabbing guitars and shrieking vocals are the perfect background noise for this tale of decaying American excess. It’s the look and sound of the Bush era deflating like a balloon. This unforgiving world bent on authoritarian violence is also boring as hell, dying in a puddle of its own filth.

Unfortunately for Raphael, the police are hungry for juvenile delinquents. Raphael gets caught tagging his hometown’s most beloved landmark–a disused payphone. As punishment, the sex-obsessed Officer Williams (Danielle Evon Plonger) sends the unlucky teenager to live with (and snitch on) his affable dealer cousin, Matteo (Darius Autry). Raphael tries his best to avoid trouble, as he splits his time between hanging at Matteo’s hot pink trap house and performing community service with a friendly, Xanned-out emo girl named Bernadette (Khali Sykes).

Both Wilcox’s look and performance are reminiscent of James Duvall in Gregg Araki’s Teen Apocalypse Trilogy (1993-1997), with his stringy black hair and band t-shirts. Props, also, to costume designer Melina Perez for her work in conjuring the 2007 vibes. Outfitting Raphael in a band t-shirt worn over a white long sleeve tee was a stroke of genius. Anyone who attended high school in the States in the late 2000s either tried or knows someone who tried that look. Raphael looks as though he’s always asking himself, How did I get here? and failing to come up with an answer. He’s timid, not very talented, and perpetually out of his element These are endearing qualities, especially because he’s so often assaulted by a loud, brash world that often seems intent on killing or at least jailing him.

The charm of Rats! lies in its seemingly endless cast of side characters. Raphael never runs out of people to meet on his quest to make it through probation unharmed. A fresh, new sociopath is always just around the corner, in this country that’s been drained of empathy after slogging through the Iraq War, Katrina, and a range of other Bush-era catastrophes. They’re a fascinating cross-section of pathetic Americans. There’s murderous gift shop cashier who very nearly kills Raphael and Bernadette, a megalomaniacal trash lord who rules over teens on probation with an iron fist, and horned-up true crime aficionados who are hoping against hope that someone is committing murder over at Matteo’s house. Each of them, in their own way, seeks to exert control over helpless Raphael and his misfit pals. It’s a rat-eat-rat world, and it seems that the only escape is death or imprisonment.

Officer Williams is the most fearsome, ludicrous, and power-hungry of them all, rampaging through the film like a dangerously horny Terminator. Even the FBI agents parked across the street from Matteo’s place seem to quake before her presence. Without a doubt, Plonger gives the most physical performance in the film: we first meet her as she’s running across a parking lot to tackle Raphael, and she carries that furious, slapstick energy through the rest of the proceedings. Her delusional grudge against Raphael makes little sense–and that’s the point! She’s exercising power for power’s sake, and our unlucky protagonist just so happened to get caught in her crosshairs. At one point, Raphael tells Bernadette, “I don’t know these people. This is just my circumstance.” That could be his catchphrase. He’s the straight man, an unwilling observer of the chaos that surrounds, a tragic victim of his absurd circumstances. It’s no wonder that he is interested when Bernadette offers to whisk him away to Iowa.

The production design calls to mind Nickelodeon sitcoms, aughts nostalgia Tumblrs, and John Waters at his ugliest. These sensibilities collide in my favorite set from the film: the overwhelmingly pink home of the aforementioned true crime freaks, Shay (Ariel Fish) and Paul (Brian Villalobos). Their whole place is decked out with framed pornography and an overabundance of stereotypical Wine Mom wall art. Shay berates her haplessly devoted partner while staring into a mirror that says, “I WILL.” Block letters on the wall urge her to “KEEP CALM AND DREAM” as she rails cocaine, anxiously anticipating a gruesome true crime story that could skyrocket her to (local) fame. It’s a nightmarish setting, the exploded psyche of a narcissist who’s become dependent on trite affirmations. In Rats!, the only way to get ahead is through domination or exploitation. Shay’s interior decor reflects her steadfast commitment to her “hustle,” or“grind.” The idea that a killer may be running rampant in their town does not elicit fear or pity for the victims from her, only excitement at the prospect of finally hitting it big. She’s an exaggerated version of a type of person that you can still find today, if you just replaced her desire to anchor the local news with a desire to go viral on TikTok.

Not all of the jokes in Rats! land, but there are enough of them that the film endeared itself to me despite its shortcomings. Its attempts at gross-out humor shocked me at points. Not since going through a Troma phase as a teenager have I seen a movie with a closeup shot of poop coming out of someone’s butthole. I may wish it was a bit funnier, but I can’t say that I wish it was more disgusting. This is meant to be a compliment: I wouldn’t mind if more comedies went this hard in their quest for laughs, even if it means that I get a little sick to my stomach sometimes.

Rats! is most successful when it’s lampooning the violent impulses that lay dormant in many Americans. Rats! accurately observes that many people in this country are impatiently waiting for the chance to unleash their righteous fury upon someone else. For the outcasts like Raphael and Bernadette, the best course of action is to pop a Xan, lay low, and wait for everything to blow over.

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