Two attractive women move into an old house invested with rats.Soon they are stalked and molested by ghostly transvestite."A Rat in the Darkness" by Alfredo Salazar has to be seen to be believed.The plot is incredibly dumb and the climax is laughably perverse and stupid.There is plenty of delicious sleaze and graphic nudity,so fans of exploitation cinema won't be disappointed.One of the women reminded me a little bit Katell Laennec from Andrea Bianchi's smutty "Malabimba".Overall,if you are into sleaze and haunted house movies you can't go wrong with this obnoxious Mexican piece of filth.6 rats out of 10.
4 Reviews
Sleaze
BandSAboutMovies22 June 2022
Warning: Spoilers
Alfredo Salazar wrote 65 movies (Frankestein el Vampiro y Compañía, Doctor of Doom and The Panther Women to name a few) and directed 11 and none of them prepared me - not even the black magic clown movie Herencia Diabólica for this movie.
Somehow, this movie seems Italian despite being made in Mexico and that's a supreme compliment in my world. Josefina Hill (Ana Luisa Peluffo) and her sister Sonia (Anaís de Melo) have purchased a run-down mansion for a too good to be true price and you know how that goes in a horror movie.
Josefine is the more level headed of the two, a college professor, while Sonia has had mental powers since she was a child, using her abilities to predict the death of their mother and find lost items. And I say they're sisters, because the movie tells us so, but they also indulge in topless massages and discuss that they've never been married so that they can always be there for one another.
There's a painting of a mean-looking woman over the fireplace that ends up being the portrait of the madame that once ran this house of the rising sun and if we've learned anything from The Nesting, if there's a bordello being turned into a house, there are ghosts. The madame was killed by a lover she hurt, but she may have also have been the person who sold them the house. Seeing as how the girls have already left their lease, they decide to move into the mansion with no electricity or telephone, because what could go wrong?
The madame begins to visit Sonia and comes between the sisters - psychically - and then the ghost - is it a ghost? - ends up seducing both of them. This movie is completely unconcerned with being incredibly sleazy, so perhaps this ghost is seducing me by knowing exactly the strangeness that I want from my entertainment.
Panties are stolen, rats run wild and the real identity of the madame is probably going to upset a lot of people if they ever see this movie. It doesn't explain the flying objects, little earthquakes or the fact that the madame's hands glow blue when she appears. There's also a lovemaking scene that sends Josefina into the kind of bliss that makes her imagine that she's dancing around a piano.
Peluffo was one of the first Mexican actresses to appear nude - in 1955's La fuerza del deseo - and she's also in a movie that may challenge this for being as weird as it gets, El Violador Infernal, which has her play El Diablo and give a condemned man the chance to live forever as long as he sexually assaults people, kills them and then carves 666 into their bodies. Trust me, Mexican sleaze horror defines the term problematic and then pisses all over the dictionary.
Somehow, this movie seems Italian despite being made in Mexico and that's a supreme compliment in my world. Josefina Hill (Ana Luisa Peluffo) and her sister Sonia (Anaís de Melo) have purchased a run-down mansion for a too good to be true price and you know how that goes in a horror movie.
Josefine is the more level headed of the two, a college professor, while Sonia has had mental powers since she was a child, using her abilities to predict the death of their mother and find lost items. And I say they're sisters, because the movie tells us so, but they also indulge in topless massages and discuss that they've never been married so that they can always be there for one another.
There's a painting of a mean-looking woman over the fireplace that ends up being the portrait of the madame that once ran this house of the rising sun and if we've learned anything from The Nesting, if there's a bordello being turned into a house, there are ghosts. The madame was killed by a lover she hurt, but she may have also have been the person who sold them the house. Seeing as how the girls have already left their lease, they decide to move into the mansion with no electricity or telephone, because what could go wrong?
The madame begins to visit Sonia and comes between the sisters - psychically - and then the ghost - is it a ghost? - ends up seducing both of them. This movie is completely unconcerned with being incredibly sleazy, so perhaps this ghost is seducing me by knowing exactly the strangeness that I want from my entertainment.
Panties are stolen, rats run wild and the real identity of the madame is probably going to upset a lot of people if they ever see this movie. It doesn't explain the flying objects, little earthquakes or the fact that the madame's hands glow blue when she appears. There's also a lovemaking scene that sends Josefina into the kind of bliss that makes her imagine that she's dancing around a piano.
Peluffo was one of the first Mexican actresses to appear nude - in 1955's La fuerza del deseo - and she's also in a movie that may challenge this for being as weird as it gets, El Violador Infernal, which has her play El Diablo and give a condemned man the chance to live forever as long as he sexually assaults people, kills them and then carves 666 into their bodies. Trust me, Mexican sleaze horror defines the term problematic and then pisses all over the dictionary.
wow, really incredibly bad...
eric-148024 April 2007
Warning: Spoilers
unbelievable. Makes zero sense ---
It starts out as a standard haunted house --- with a couple of new owners, two pretty women.
A female ghost still hangs about and comes into the women's bedrooms at night to molest them.
The house shakes as though in a gigantic earthquake, the doors and windows slam shut to block escape, spectral lights and smoke, paintings and pots and pans and knives float around in all directions ---
...add a couple blatantly gratuitous nude scenes and...
...in the end, after both women have been thoroughly molested and killed by floating objects, the house is back up for sale -- when the agent and new owner (also a pretty woman) leave -- we follow the owner upstairs, where she looks in the mirror and whips off a bad wig to reveal... the 'ghost' was just a complete creep transvestite, now laughing maniacally at his successful con. No magic. No ghosts. no explanation of how or why all the stuff was flying around and the house shook so violently. Really about as bad as any first year film student could do for community college night course.
It starts out as a standard haunted house --- with a couple of new owners, two pretty women.
A female ghost still hangs about and comes into the women's bedrooms at night to molest them.
The house shakes as though in a gigantic earthquake, the doors and windows slam shut to block escape, spectral lights and smoke, paintings and pots and pans and knives float around in all directions ---
...add a couple blatantly gratuitous nude scenes and...
...in the end, after both women have been thoroughly molested and killed by floating objects, the house is back up for sale -- when the agent and new owner (also a pretty woman) leave -- we follow the owner upstairs, where she looks in the mirror and whips off a bad wig to reveal... the 'ghost' was just a complete creep transvestite, now laughing maniacally at his successful con. No magic. No ghosts. no explanation of how or why all the stuff was flying around and the house shook so violently. Really about as bad as any first year film student could do for community college night course.
"When we were orphaned you took on the role of a mother,I really never felt her absence."
morrison-dylan-fan8 October 2019
Warning: Spoilers
After a terrific time watching a duo of Mexican Horror titles fellow IMDber melvelvit-1 had kindly sent me,I felt it was the right moment to open the crypt of Mexican Horrors I had picked up waiting to be played. Standing out from the pact of flicks after reading reviews on Letterboxd, I started looking for a rat in the dark.
View on the film:
Getting comfy in the new home, writer/director Alfredo Salazar & cinematographer Miguel Garzon weave a silky dream-logic supernatural horror atmosphere, spun in bright red dissolves across the household,panning to a excellent use by Salazar of rumbling sound effects giving a weight to the floating objects thrown across the rooms.
Enticingly setting up a full circle ending in a underhanded manner at the beginning, Salazar thankfully refrains from any moralising, in the steamy sex scenes, which Salazar holds to draw the power play in the relationship between the masculine Sonia and the motherly Josefina and builds on the sensual dream-logic mood, climaxing in a delightfully sleight of hand turn into psychotronic madness.
Although not offering a solid answer on if the ghostly sounds were actually caused by the spirit of the old owner,or actually just part of a bigger game, the screenplay by Salazar rides over what could be bumps in the road, by placing a focus on the psychological horror between Josefina and Sonia, whose bonds of trust snap to doubt over how much they really should trust each other.
Sizzling the screen in their close encounters, fitties Ana Luisa Peluffo and Anais de Melo give excellent turns as Josefina and Sonia,thanks to the sexy duo being on the same page in expressing their dream-logic sensual desires, with a tastefully ripe, visible relish of screaming with paranoid fear from seeing a rat in the darkness.
View on the film:
Getting comfy in the new home, writer/director Alfredo Salazar & cinematographer Miguel Garzon weave a silky dream-logic supernatural horror atmosphere, spun in bright red dissolves across the household,panning to a excellent use by Salazar of rumbling sound effects giving a weight to the floating objects thrown across the rooms.
Enticingly setting up a full circle ending in a underhanded manner at the beginning, Salazar thankfully refrains from any moralising, in the steamy sex scenes, which Salazar holds to draw the power play in the relationship between the masculine Sonia and the motherly Josefina and builds on the sensual dream-logic mood, climaxing in a delightfully sleight of hand turn into psychotronic madness.
Although not offering a solid answer on if the ghostly sounds were actually caused by the spirit of the old owner,or actually just part of a bigger game, the screenplay by Salazar rides over what could be bumps in the road, by placing a focus on the psychological horror between Josefina and Sonia, whose bonds of trust snap to doubt over how much they really should trust each other.
Sizzling the screen in their close encounters, fitties Ana Luisa Peluffo and Anais de Melo give excellent turns as Josefina and Sonia,thanks to the sexy duo being on the same page in expressing their dream-logic sensual desires, with a tastefully ripe, visible relish of screaming with paranoid fear from seeing a rat in the darkness.
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