Had the Soviets known that the fall of Communism would lead to films like this coproduction between Roger Corman's New Horizons and the Russian studio Mosfilm, they would have fought harder to win the Cold War.
While traveling through Eastern Europe, young Bram Stoker (Kevin Alber) and his father (Eduard Plaxin) are attacked by hooded figures who rob them and kidnap Bram. They take him to their castle, the home of a group of women who, under the leadership of their Queen (Adrienne Barbeau), use rats to
terrorize men.
The Queen sentences Bram to a ritual death, but his life is spared when his captor Madeleine (Maria Ford), moved by his devotion to his father, fails to strike the killing blow. In his cell he tells her of his desire to be a writer, and she smuggles a pen and paper in to him.
Reading his description of one of their raids, the Queen decides that Bram's stories are perfect weapons to help strike terror into the hearts of their enemies. Deciding to join their cause, Bram helps them rescue Madeleine from the local prison where she is being tortured.
At his initiation ceremony, Bram is told to execute a hooded man. He is stopped from killing the man--his captured father--by the arrival of armed forces, who battle the rat women. Realizing her cause is lost, the Queen commands her rats to devour her. Madeleine is killed helping Bram and his
father escape, and the older man advises his son to write about her so that she will live forever.
Movies just don't come any more foolish than this effort, whose sole distinction is the ability of its director and cast to play such risible material with straight faces. (Special credit goes to Barbeau's character, whose dialogue consists in large part of stuff like "I am the queen of vermin,
the pied piper's twisted sister!") BURIAL OF THE RATS is simply an excuse to fill the screen with a few dozen women in patent leather push-up bras, high heel boots, and G-strings (or, in the case of the numerous dance scenes sprinkled through the film, even less). A few scenes reach an almost
Monty Python-ish level of absurdity, as when the rat women storm the torture dungeon and randomly slaughter everyone in their path, including the prisoners. But the viewer has to work hard to find even that much to enjoy. (Graphic violence, extensive nudity, sexual situations, adult situations,
substance abuse, extreme profanity.) leave a comment
