Combining The Road Warrior soon made the post-apocalypse one of sci-fi’s most popular settings.
The original Mad Max did see Mel Gibson’s title character stalking and killing a colorful biker gang to avenge the murder of his wife and child, but the surprisingly subdued thriller featured few over-the-top elements outside of its villains. It was The Road Warrior that introduced Lord Humungus and the Marauders, theatrical antagonists who faced off against equally cartoonish heroes in the movie’s garish vision of a post-apocalyptic future. It was this sequel's aesthetic, which fused deserted settings with punk-inspired costumes and amoral, larger-than-life characters, that soon came to rule ‘80s sci-fi.
However, while the Miller’s gory action classic The Road Warrior and instead ended up becoming an unintentional comedy.
Rats: Night of Terror Explained
A cheap monster movie, Rats: Night of Terror is surprisingly ambitious in its story. Set 225 years after a nuclear apocalypse, the action of Rats sees a roving gang of bikers wander into an abandoned research facility and end up trapped inside by the titular menaces. There are power struggles within the group and a slew of gory demise, but interestingly, Rats: Night of Terror features no human antagonists for the characters to face off against. Instead, Mattei’s characters are antiheroic enough to qualify as both heroes and villains. Their struggle for survival sees many of the gang turns on each other much like Mad Max’s Toecutter and his untrustworthy underlings, except that this gang is driven apart not by an avenging angel like Max, but rather by some harmless-looking rodents.
How Rats: Night of Terror Ripped Off Mad Max
Save for their stoic leader (modeled on Max himself), Rats: Night of Terror's criminal gang’s characters and costumes owe a major debt to the villains of the first two Mad Max films. In this movie, they are the supposed heroes, but they’re as ruthless, trigger happy, and internally divided as Toecutter’s gang and Lord Humungus’ henchmen—and as quick to bite the bullet. Meanwhile, the swiftly-sidelined backstory of Mattei’s movie also borrowed from Miller’s Mad Max universe, although not as egregiously. The end of the world is blamed on nuclear war in Rats: Night of Terror, the same cause cited by some of the Mad Max movies. However, the Mad Max franchise changed the apocalypse’s cause numerous times throughout its four movies, so this is one of Night of Terror’s easier to excuse borrows.
How Rats Failed As A Monster Movie
Although Rats: Night of Terror later became a cult classic thanks to its inherent absurdity, the decision to make the movie’s monsters ordinary rats rather than mutated or giant rodents. This means most of the Mad Max knock-off’s runtime is spent watching supposedly hardened survivalists run from tiny, cute threats they could easily kick aside or kill. It’s an absurd premise that relies on characters accidentally falling downstairs, standing in front of open windows or rolling around on the ground to make a blatantly harmless threat seem lethal. The fact that the characters are supposedly grizzled bikers modeled on Lord Humungus and The Road Warriors’ villains also makes their inability to handle some standard-sized rodents particularly laughable.
How Rats Failed As A Mad Max Knock-off
While calling Rats: Night of Terror a Mad Max knock-off appears to limit its potential success, there have been instances of movies that succeeded despite being modeled on bigger hits. For instance, Steven Spielberg himself itted that director Joe Dante’s Piranha was the best of the many Top Gun “rip-off” Iron Eagle ed to keep its action airborne and ensure the threadbare plot never distracted from high-flying stunt work, whereas Rats took the bare bones premises of Mad Max and The Road Warrior only to then cut the action, i.e. the most important element of both movies.
Without a heroic (or even antiheroic) character to root for, Rats: Night of Terror viewers were left watching a criminal gang’s largely unlikable being slowly picked off by an unthreatening villain. Without any fast-paced chases or action setpieces, the main characters being part of a biker gang didn’t affect Rats and deprived viewers of Mad Max's silent cinema-inspired action set-pieces. Thus, Rats: Night of Terror profoundly misunderstood why viewers flocked to see Miller’s cult hits and made a biker movie with no chases and an action movie with no discernible character to root for. Thus, Mattei's movie became legendary among fans of unintentional comedy but failed as both a horror movie or a Mad Max copycat.
