RT Obscura, the exclusive bi-weekly column by renowned critic Kim Newman, sees the writer plumbing the depths of the Rotten Tomatoes archive in search of some forgotten gems. In his sixth column, Kim explores a Roger Corman-produced Bram Stoker adaptation featuring rats and naked women. Obviously.
In the early-to-mid-90s, the long-dead Bram Stoker picked up Q-factor points thanks to a quirk whereby Universal Pictures owned American copyright to the simple title Dracula, prompting Francis Ford Coppola to add a possessory credit to his 1992 film and claim it was officially called Bram Stoker’s Dracula. A few direct-to-video schlock items, either genuinely or notionally drawn from the Stoker library, followed suit: Bram Stoker’s Legend of the Mummy (from Jewel of the Seven Stars), Bram Stoker’s Shadowbuilder (from a short story), and this conceptually breathtaking if prosaically-executed Roger Corman runaway production.
The title comes from one of Stoker’s gruesome, still-underrated short stories (a curse of writing one single masterpiece is that it tends to swallow the reputation of everything else the author ever did) and refers to the practice of having toothy rodents reduce corpses to skeletons with piranha-like all-devouring ferocity. The plot, however, is new-made and almost-endearingly cracked. Sometime in the 19th Century, a long-haired surfer guy called Abraham ‘Bram’ Stoker (Kevin Alber) is travelling through France with his stern father (Eduard Plaxin) and occasionally whining that he’d rather be a writer than a dull official. As it happens, their coach is waylaid by a couple of ‘rat women’, who wear very 1995 thongs, boots and brassieres under their cloaks and are conducting raids against male oppressors in the region. Bram winds up a captive of the rat women, who are queened over by Adrienne Barbeau (in a role that evokes her turn in the wittier Piranha Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death) and apparently comprise put-upon rejects rescued from exploitation, drudgery or prostitution.
The Queen decides to keep Bram alive after some mild torture because he promises to write up their exploits as blood-curdling pamphlets which will spread their terrifying reputation around and put male readers off the idea of being mean to womenfolk. Our hero starts cuddling (in an achingly familiar softcore interlude set in a romantic dungeon) with the slightly soft-hearted rat woman Madeleine (Marla Ford), which gives her more militant comrade Anna (Olga Kabo) a bad case of jealousy that betokens sorry plot developments later. After raids on a hypocritical monastary and the local brothel, a mob of angry men track the rat women back to their vast but apparently unnoticed palace. Stoker’s father is abducted by Anna and Bram has to fence deftly to save him, then the two female leads perform a spirited sword-fight while dressed in Victoria’s Secret catalogue cast-offs. When the vile men force their way into the throne-room, the Queen opts for the ‘burial of the rats’ and has her pets scurry into her clothes and gnaw her down to a skeleton in a few seconds rather than fall into the hands of her enemies.
Obviously, historical accuracy was the last thing on anyone’s minds: the beardless, non-Irish, ordinary-framed Alber doesn’t resemble the big, bear-like, red-headed Bram of the biographies, and the script doesn’t even take common approach (cf: The Spectre of Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Frost’s novel The List of Seven) of pitching the young writer into a mystery adventure which might conceivably inspire his famous later work (though there is one tiny bit of blood-drinking). It’s more of a problem that Alber is pretty much a stiff even on the film’s own terms — whenever he has a close-up, you can’t help but wish the camera were looking at someone else and his reams of dialogue can’t compete with a sidelong glance from Barbeau. Followed by Haunted Symphony (aka Hellfire aka Blood Song), this was one of a handful of films Corman made in Russia, taking advantage of the former Soviet Union’s lavish film studios (and apparent superfluity of strippers trained in classical ballet). Given the subject matter, it seems perverse that it wasn’t one of the projects he shot in Ireland around the same time (eg: Wolfhound, Knocking on Death’s Door). The selection of France as a setting is also mildly mystifying, though the original Burial of the Rats story is set there (it’s also about a traveller who gets waylaid, but that’s about it as far as direct inspiration goes).
Though it has some torture dungeons and the ever-popular devouring rat angle, it’s not even really a horror film but a landlocked feminist pirate movie. Indeed, the rat women’s M.O. of making surprise raids on offending premises and then escaping into the night would make a lot more sense if they were working out of a ship as opposed to a palace. A fright-haired and impeccably coutured Barbeau, the main acting draw, hogs the fun lines (‘I control the rats of St Cecile, because I am the Queen of Vermin, the Pied Piper’s twisted sister!’ ‘Let us affirm this truth – we are all vermin in the ratholes of the universe!’) while busy schlock starlet Ford (memorable as the naked witch demon of The Unnameable Returns) and the Russian minx Kabo (whose home credits sound more respectable than her lively, often nude turn here) are at least game in action scenes and hair-pulling.
However, Dan Golden‘s direction could do with more demented oomph. Come on… Rats! Underwear girls! Literary footnotes! Feminist pirates! Adrienne Barbeau! Torture! Duelling babes! Rapist monks! Bloody skeletons! How hard can it be to make something memorably insane with those ingredients? Does the world really need a staid, stately exploitation movie? The script is credited to Adrien Hein, Tara McCann, Daniella Purcell (who also wrote Dracula Rising for Corman) and novelist S.P. Somtow (who wrote Vampire Junction). We’ll bet Somtow wrote Barbeau’s lines. Nikki Fritz and Linnea Quigley, ubiquitous in US-made softcore, play a couple of the rat women — presumably in scenes shot in the States and tipped in later to boost the already healthy skin quotient.
