Rats: Night of Terror (1983)
The year is 225 A.B. The A.B. stands for "after the bomb" and the world is a different place than the one we're used to in Italian gore movies. Gone are the cities infested by zombies, gone are the tropical jungles infested by zombies, gone are the grottos infested by vampires. All that remains are buildings infested with rats. But not just any rats mind you, but rats that look suspiciously like guinea pigs with a nice bronzer applied. It's all because of the radiation and the accompanying mutation you understand. It makes you wonder what guinea pigs look like in this new world!
The problem with the guinea pigs playing the rats is that in most scenes all they're doing is milling around, occasionally sniffing the air (probably the fumes from their paint job) and sometimes crawling on counters and stuff. For scenes requiring the rats to attack humans, they drop from above and you just know that some Italian guy made about 50 lira a week dumping buckets of rats on the people starring in this movie. Other times the rat attacks are accomplished by having some other guy probably stand just out of camera range and lob gobs of rats at these people who have to shriek and cower, instead of just running away which is what a regular person would do. Since this is A.B. and times have changed they just stand around yelling and moaning about how the rats are biting them.
But just who are these rodent-fearing primitives that have taken to living again on the planet's surface while everyone else still lives underground? Bikers, you fools, bikers! Yes, after the bomb the people that decide to make a go of it on the surface immediately become a biker gang. I don't know how or why, but they're a motley crew of people with catchy biker names like Video, Chocolate (she's the token black survivor), Taurus, and their fearless leader whose handle is Kurt. Kurt? The only great leader I ever heard of named Kurt was former St. Louis Rams quarterback Kurt Warner.
The action begins in earnest when Kurt's biker gang roll into some abandoned city and Kurt gets off his hog, looks around and gives the okay to stop. This biker gang of Kurt's is something to behold. I don't like to talk out of school but back in the day when I used to ride with the Brotherhood on the left coast (and you know which gang that was since I capitalized the "b" on brotherhood), we all wore our leathers and our colors, but I don't remember anyone wearing neck kerchiefs like Fred from Scooby-Doo or studded headbands. I remember those from a 1983 Pat Benatar music video, but not when cruising 101 with the boys. 
This biker gang decides that this is a good place to spend the night in spite of the rats they've observed and immediately split up to check the place out. They locate a bunch of plants that are being grown by someone with grow lights and stuff. They also find a room with a bunch of 1980s era computers (about the size of a couple of biker mamas) and Video starts punching buttons and a message comes up about eliminating the group. Whoops! This is also about the time that someone mentions that he doesn't like the combination of computers and rat-bitten corpses that they found earlier.
The power to the growlights gets turned on and Noah hangs around down there and starts gardening or something. This is also where a water purifier is, but the rats start dropping into it causing the bikers to whine (and yes it comes off as a whine) about how their water is getting polluted. With the gang split up, the rats start to pick them off.
Lucifer and his girlfriend get killed separately after they take their sleeping bag somewhere else to hump. This was fortunate because Lucifer felt pretty uninhibited with his nakedness and from what I had to see, he should have been plenty inhibited. His girlfriend gets the award for "Best Death in A Sleeping Bag" when rats crawl in it and she can't escape because the zipper is stuck! Should've got one from L.L. Bean. When the other bikers find her body, they don't bother to pull her out to see what she died from, they just assume that Lucifer must have strangled her. Wasn't it obvious that she had been attacked by man-eating rats and had the zipper get stuck on her sleeping bag, making it her tomb, albeit a comfy-cozy one?
Enough people start turning up dead and rat-bitten that Kurt finally realizes that they are under attack by the rats. The rats though are one step ahead of Kurt and everyone is really bummed to find out that the rats have eaten the tires on their motorcycles making escape impossible. Unless you were to simply walk out the front door until you were good and far away from the rats. But to a biker gang, that's just so much crazy talk!
They decide to stay the night and trap themselves in this building by boarding it up Night Of The Living Dead-style. I found this to be kind of dumb since the rats were already in the building and anyone that's ever had a mouse problem in their house will tell you that it's not as simple as nailing the doors and windows shut. In fact, I bet they would say that they would rather try and keep flesheating zombies out of their house as opposed to those little varmints. 
Now even though they decide to board up all the doors and windows, someone somehow forgets to board up the window that a couple of them are standing next to. This results in lots of rats flying and jumping through the window like they were being thrown by an Italian grip or best boy or whatever union job is in charge of that sort of thing. People keep getting chomped and this doughy guy (Duke) dressed up in a Michael Jackson military outfit starts challenging Kurt's authority to lead the gang (there's about five of them left now).
They have a showdown and Duke temporarily backs down. Later Duke would take one of the girls hostage aboard this big tank-like bus vehicle they have and ends up blowing him and her up with a grenade that he tosses at some rats in the truck he was standing in. Good move, Duke - that's real leadership material. Duke did come in with some good dialogue when another guy said that rats can tell an intruder by smelling the intruder's urine. Duke asks if the rats were attacking because they smelled how everyone had pissed themselves because they were scared. Good old lovable crusty Duke. You can be sure he's making the Big Man Upstairs laugh with that salty wit.
One of the remaining girls goes crazy and slits her wrists and then Kurt shoots her trying to hit rats or something. Later he's crying and wussing around about how cruddy everything has kind of turned out. They find some gizmo that plays a recording of a guy who explains how the rats mutated and came from underground because they had been forced out by something to do with the people that live down there. It was a rather long-winded speech and didn't really explain anything more than we already knew, but did set up the ending that was so shocking I guessed it as soon I saw all these people with hoods and gas masks and fishbowl helmets you couldn't see through.
In a welcome surprise, Kurt gets eaten up by the rats and only Chocolate and Video are left. With Video's blonde perm and fey demeanor, I never would have pegged him as one of the two to survive this night of terror and I certainly wouldn't peg him to help restart the human race above ground. 
It's the next morning and all these people in hazmat suits have come from underground spraying rat poison
all over and killing all the rats. Chocolate thanks them for saving them and these guys just look at her through their
masks without saying anything. Chocolate starts to get worried that maybe all isn't what it seems to be with these other
survivors and then this dude takes his mask off and... At this point I'm torn on whether I should tell you that this guy
had the head of a giant rat or whether I should let you experience the shock and terror yourselves.
This ending is telegraphed pretty well and doesn't do much to explain anything that was going on A.B. (you do remember what that stands for, right? If not, start the movie over from the beginning.), but it fit perfectly with the rest of this bizarre hybrid of zombie flicks, biker flicks, post-apocalyptic flicks, and rat flicks. Bruno has harnessed all his inabilities as a film maker with this movie and this effortless exercise in dumb, gory mayhem should not be missed. Not for its hilarious dialogue (one guy says "Stop talking crap!" and I've been using that saying ever since), the dubbing that made you wonder if it was added without Bruno's knowledge as some type of sick joke, or imaginative use of a completely unbelievable story (Why would there still be power on? Why would anyone be trying to grow plants when there's an army of rats on the loose? Why would World War III turn half the human race into bikers and the other half into giant vermin?).
None of this matters because the characters go from one rat encounter to the next with little time to reflect or actually think and unlike Bruno's infamous half-breed zombie movie he sort of made with Lucio Fulci (Zombie Flesh Eaters 2), this one doesn't overstay its welcome. This is really the kind of movie that restores your faith in the idea that bad Italian gore movies can be fun to watch instead of the slow, humorless machines they seem to grind out with all too frequent regularity. In a movie with lots of unanswered questions, only one really nags at me though: Why did it take all the way until 1983 for someone to make it?
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