Matcollis
This Movie Can Only Be Described With One Word.
SincereFinest
disgusting, overrated, pointless
Huievest
Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.
Humaira Grant
It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.
DigitalRevenantX7
Story Synopsis: While travelling across Russia in their carriage, a young Bram Stoker & his father are attacked by bandits accompanied by a horde of rats that devours the driver. Bram kills one of the attackers to protect his father but is captured by the bandits. Taken to their hideout, an old castle, Bram is shocked to discover that the bandits are actually scantily-clad women who shun the rule of men. He is sentenced to die but is saved by one of the "Rat Women" who falls in love with him. The queen of the Rat Women then discover that Bram has formidable writing skills, a discovery that prompts them to use Bram as a PR exercise in order to give them infamy. While some of the Rat Women try to discredit Bram, the local town, having a gutful of their raids, sends a garrison of troops to the castle in order to wipe them out.Film Analysis: Sometimes you've got to love the way Roger Corman operates. When he found out that one of Russia's film studios was going kaput, he decided to cannibalise some of their sets & write a story around it. The subsequent production was produced by Anatoly Fradis, later to become infamous among zombie fans due to his involvement in the ham-fisted sequels RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD: NECROPOLIS & RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD: RAVE TO THE GRAVE. As a horror film, Burial of the Rats is as bare as the chests of the female bandits cavorting around in it. There is a lot of supple flesh on offer here (in particular the love scene between hero Kevin Alber & his love interest Maria Ford) as well as some unintentional laughs to be had with the bandits' pet rats (who act like furry piranhas, turning their victims into bleached skeletons within seconds!).The story is fairly simple – a young Bram Stoker being abducted by a clan of women who despise men, only to become their hero thanks to his lurid tales of their raids – so there is not much to go wrong with it, at least from a narrative point of view. But in their quest to go the cheapest route possible, producer Fradis, director Dan Golden & their writers forget to write an innovative story. Instead they fill the film with blood, sex & killer rats. The story has some really absurd plot devices – the idea of the rats turning their victims into skeletons is a real howler, given that rats are incapable of doing such a feat (at least not within 30 seconds).What elevates this film from forgettable trash to functional mediocrity is the acting. Kevin Alber does a pretty good job of playing a gentleman who has his eyes opened wide enough for him to get the experience needed to write one of horror literature's great masterpieces (the novel Dracula) & even having a little fun doing so. Maria Ford makes a rather bland love interest while Adrienne Barbeau has a lot of fun playing the demented queen of the bandits.
HankyP
My first hint should have been that the movie was capitalizing on the fact it was written by Bran Stoker. I was hooping for something better than Bram Stoker's Lair of the White Worm (it would not be difficult) or "Bram Stoker's The Mummy" (the short story was Jewel of the Seven Stars) and was disappointed. This was far worse than the other two. Adrienne Barbeau herself said she only made the movie because she needed a new roof on her house and she had hoped it would never be released.Shot with no budget (except what was used to pay Barbeau) in an Eastern European country that was under civil war at the time, Burial of the Rats tells the story of Bram Stoker being kidnapped by a cult known as The Rat Women. So right off, we know he will survive or the story will never get written. I have tried to get my hands on a copy of the novella, so I cannot say how this compares to the book, but we have a lot of preaching about how evil civilization and men are, Stoker pretends to follow the Rat Women and promises to champion their cause, the Rat Women pretend to believe him, Barbeau breaks her flute that controls the rats and is eaten alive and if we have not clawed our eyes out yet we go out and get drunk so we can forget the movie.
Goreripper
This film exists halfway between softcore lesbian porn and gore-soaked splatter as a cheap exploitation film that tries and then fails to do both, without too much concern for acting or dialogue. Mountains of barely clad female flesh go hand in hand with ridiculous violence in this barely recognisable adaptation of an obscure Bram Stoker story about a coven of rat-worshipping female bandits. While there isn't actually any lesbianism shown on camera the implication of its existence overwhelms virtually every other aspect of `Burial of the Rats'. The story follows the adventure of young Bram Stoker and his father, attacked by the bandits during their travels abroad. The younger Stoker kills one of them and is captured; the elder one tries to convince the local constabulary to search for his missing son even after receiving such matter-of-fact advise as `Go on home, and forget all about your son!' In a matter of hours young Bram has fallen in love with one Barbie-doll proportioned Rat Woman and become sympathetic to the others' cause, even if it entails murderous raids on monasteries and brothels. Meaningless topless dancing scenes and silly violence follow, including a gratuitous torture dungeon sequence and the sight of a bucketful of rats picking a corpse clean to a bleached skeleton in a matter of seconds. That a god-fearing Victorian moralist like Stoker would have even conceived of something like this is unlikely: `Burial of the Rats' is pure William Castle camp from the prison guard who can't recognise the protagonist because he has a hat on (!!) to the ludicrous moment when the Rat Queen plucks a disobedient rodent out of the pack on the floor at her feet and cuts its head off-with a miniature guillotine! Insipid and inane but much more fun than a dozen far more well-made `serious' films, this is a bad movie lovers delight!
Gothbert
The movie was rented by a friend and myself for a bad movie night. I am glad to say that our hopes were quite fulfilled in this regards. Whether it be the execution on the out of tune rate, unclothing of the evil rat women, or strange antics within the movie. The best part of the movie was when a guard had to remove a hat in order to recognize Stoker.