Writer James Herbert was something of a folk hero to people of a certain age . You can praise any writer of literature as much as you want but to be a teenager in the 1980s no book was more enjoyable than one by Herbert . The 1980s was a golden period of horror and much of it was kick started by Herbert's 1974 pulp fiction horror novel THE RATS that launched a whole host of other writers such as Guy N Smith who tried to emulate Herbert's style . Time hasn't been kind to his work because horror nowadays isn't as fashionable as it was once and Herbert's books have a very formulaic , predictable structure where every chapter alternates between one that is vaguely important to the plot followed by another that serves to introduce a character only for them to be killed off at the end of the chapter . There's a lot of truth in what critics say that if you read the even numbered chapters in a Herbert novel you can still follow the plot to a tee and the odd numbered chapters are mere padding . That said if you take his books on their own terms they are rather enjoyably disturbing and entertaining . It does become noticeable that the writer had one eye on the cinema/TV market later and DOMAIN the book that ended his Rats trilogy seems a conscious attempt to pitch his novel to a film company hence the nuclear devastated landscape of London is made more film-able by having many key scenes take place in the pitch blackness of or in mist shrouded day scenes which saves on a potential budget . Apparently the writer was very unhappy about his previous books THE RATS and THE SURVIVOR being translated to screen
It seems a bit arrogant of Herbert . Despite bigging up the alleged subtext that THE RATS is supposed to have it's pretty obvious that he wasn't going to win the Nobel prize for literature . Whatever it's faults or merits THE RATS does lend itself very much to cheesy cinematic horror . The screenplay does follow the structure of the novel for the most part with the audience being witnesses to a series of episodic rat attacks and being one step ahead of the main protagonists in the story . There's two problems though . One is that the cinematography is very dark and murky and it's painfully obvious Roger Deakins didn't work on this film but maybe I was just watching a very bad print so should be forgiving . What is less forgivable is the production team trying o get around realising rat attacks on screen . Some of the close ups see animatronics used which are serviceable but for medium and long shots the production team use dachshunds made up to resemble rats . They're made up very badly I hasten to add and the effect is often laughable and even if you didn't know they were sausage dogs you're painfully aware that they're not rats either . Well let's be somewhat charitable and say there is an element of fun to all this as people are eaten alive by the dachshunds and stops the film from having a cynical mean spiritedness
It seems a bit arrogant of Herbert . Despite bigging up the alleged subtext that THE RATS is supposed to have it's pretty obvious that he wasn't going to win the Nobel prize for literature . Whatever it's faults or merits THE RATS does lend itself very much to cheesy cinematic horror . The screenplay does follow the structure of the novel for the most part with the audience being witnesses to a series of episodic rat attacks and being one step ahead of the main protagonists in the story . There's two problems though . One is that the cinematography is very dark and murky and it's painfully obvious Roger Deakins didn't work on this film but maybe I was just watching a very bad print so should be forgiving . What is less forgivable is the production team trying o get around realising rat attacks on screen . Some of the close ups see animatronics used which are serviceable but for medium and long shots the production team use dachshunds made up to resemble rats . They're made up very badly I hasten to add and the effect is often laughable and even if you didn't know they were sausage dogs you're painfully aware that they're not rats either . Well let's be somewhat charitable and say there is an element of fun to all this as people are eaten alive by the dachshunds and stops the film from having a cynical mean spiritedness