13A

When the Apocalypse comes, it'll be good to know how readily available motor transportation will be and how, so long as you're willing to obliterate scores of mohawked gimps, you'll have gas enough to operate even the most inefficient gas-guzzler. Now things won't be all fun and games, for as we all know radiation will not kill you, but it will create all sorts of magical mutants whom live for nothing more than to murder humanity.

This time it's Sewer rats… well, actually they're a combination of guinea pigs painted black and rubber rats glued to a conveyer belt, but at least the motorcycle gang in the movie believes them to be rats. The protagonist gang of road warrior scavengers happen upon an old army base chock full of food, beds, and apparently an old timey cowboy bar. After celebrating the finally finding food by wasting most of it in a food fight (and the black girl in the group having a laugh about being covered by flour and doing her “white-girl” dance) the group discovers why the base was abandoned as the “rats” launch their well planned scheme to trap and destroy the scum, although the success of the rats my be more properly attributed to the stupidity of the bikers.

Moment of Madness: This one's surely in the PETA hate file. There are several scenes where you see Guinea pigs launched through the air at speeds that can't result in a happy end for the poor rodents. In a special scene where the biker leader covers the escape of his friends by shooting a flame thrower into the sewers, you can actually see Guinea pigs running away while burning, oh god are the shrieks horrible.

Bullshit or Reel?

Reel, This one is called “Rats, Night of Terror,” and it has one of the most amazingly retarded endings in movie history. I'd love to tell you about it, but it would be a grand disservice; I'm serious, you have to see this!

13B

There are certain movies that inspire their own sub-genre of copycats, one such movie was the Romero classic “Dawn of the Dead,” which spawned hundreds of clones in Europe. Now some of these really didn't have a budget (unlike Romero, who was rolling in the cash), and boy did it show.

In this movie a factory operating out of Africa (no particular country, just Africa) has an accident involving a rat playing possum and soon a zombie outbreak is in action. A crack team of government CIA-types (fresh from killing a gang of radicals who took hostages in an attempt bring attention to the African zombie outbreak, but then forgetting to tell anyone about their reasons) are sent to travel across Africa in an attempt to reach the factory and try to find a cure for the virus. Now the movie didn't have the budget to actually film in Africa, so they instead spliced in clips from a nature documentary, so you'd see plenty of shots where someone would look up and point into the trees, and the camera would cut to a shot of waterfowl. The team saves a sexy reporter and her Yanni-looking cameraman, who later save them from hostile natives by painting her breasts. The zombie effects are laughable and the only horrifying elements of the film are the occasional scenes from the documentary showing the hellish funeral/cannibal rituals of the native tribes. In the end the crew arrives at the factory, only to reveal that the leader of the group is secretly working for the company and was hired to cover up the company's ties to the plague. The flick ends with people in the westernized world ignoring the TV news from Africa, only to be attacked and killed when the disease spreads to their country, this is either meant as a metaphor for the dangers of cold war policies come home to roost or just the age old danger of supporting corporations who make zombies… go to hell Wal-Mart!

Moment of madness: There's a particularly hilarious scene in what I can only assume is the UN, or a junior college lecture hall anyway. There a representative from the country of Africa makes an impassioned plea to a near empty room about the plight of his people, only to be addressed by the US rep, who gives him an “oh, would you look at the time” kind of response and walks out.

Bullshit or Reel?

Reel, this sucker has about 14 different names, but “Hell of the Living Dead” is the one I'll refer to it by. If you've been inspired to track down this nightmare, it's available with “Rats, night of terror” from Anchor Bay.