Hercules against the Moon Men (Italy, 1964)

(Let's meander!) Far from the best of the peplums, Hercules against the Moon Men, like most movies of the genre, has enough going for it that it remains fun and watchable even though you know you could do way, way, way better. Indeed, there is an obvious reason why this Alan Steel movie was so happily embraced for ridicule by Mystery Theatre 3000: it is hilariously bad.

Trailer to

Hercules against the Moon Men:

The version we watched for our write-up here is found on the "Digitally Remastered" DVD (photo above) released by the now long gone, public domain-trawling cheapsters Digiview Productions, and the quality of the rip is pretty ghastly. Pan-and-scanned, faded and scratchy, and missing at least one scene — we noticed the lack of the monster fight after Hercules escapes from being drowned, a fight subsequently referred to by the baddies — the "remastering" is so cheap that sometimes, particularly during close-ups, the people shimmer and undulate, ever so slightly, like a mirage in the desert. (You get what you pay for.)

But while a better source copy would surely have added the visual joy of color and clarity, one is hard placed to say that the film itself would be any better, as everything about it — the narrative, the padding of certain scenes (there is an interminable sandstorm-on-the-mountain scene that does nothing for the plot or story but goes on forever), the acting, the direction, you name it — but for the muscles of beefy DILF Alan Steel, and the covered, well-proportioned bosom of important tertiary character Princess Billis (Delia D'Alberti of Mutande pazze [1992 / trailer] and Bad Inclination [2003 / trailer]) — is second or third class at best.

Hercules against the Moon Men is the final directorial effort of director Giacomo Gentilomo (5 Apr 1909 – 12 Apr 2001) who, "along with few other filmmakers of his generation (most notably Primo Zeglio, Giorgio Ferroni, and Vittorio Cottafavi), [...] still hasn't received proper film historical credit for pioneering and perfecting several trends in post-war Italian cinema [Viennale]." His days of pioneering long past, Gentilomo, dissatisfied with lowly genre product he now usually helmed, left the film industry after making Hercules against the Moon Men to pursue a career as an artist. (Directly below is an example of a work on paper of his, a 1972 collage titled Dance. One can but wonder whether or not he was a better artist than director. [Not.])

Actually, Gentilomo didn't even make Hercules against the Moon Men: he made a movie titled Maciste e la regina di Samar, or Maciste and the Queen of Samar, Maciste being the popular cult character of Italian cinema that has refused to die since first introduced in the 1914 silent Italian classic, Cabiria (full film). But since the name Maciste, which is arguably a nickname cum surname of Hercules, was and is pretty much unknown outside of Pastaland, Gentilomo's movie, like most Maciste movies, became a Hercules flick when it traveled to English-language countries.

Within the realm of Hercules and peplum in general, Hercules against the Moon Men is one of the genre-crossover kind, ala the peplum cum horror that is Mario Bava's Hercules in the Haunted World (1961 / trailer, with Reg "Delicious" Park [7 Jun 1928 – 22 Nov 2007], pictured below), and Sergio Corbucci and Gentilomo's Goliath and the Vampires (1961 / trailer, with Gordon "Not Our Thing" Scott* [3 Aug 1926 – 30 Apr 2007]), or the a wasted life favorite peplum cum science fiction flick, the far better Giant of Metropolis (1961), starring manly Gordon Mitchell (29 Jul 1923 – 20 Sept 2003).

* Was Gordon Scott a closet case? Well, for a factually challenged narrative (complete with hardcore gay porn images, but none of "Gordon's gigantic Mortadella"), check out the eternally sleazy and wiener-fixated blogspot Tales of Hollywood, which specializes in factually questionable second- and third-hand sex stories of gay Hollyweird. Not for readers who freak at the sight of man-meat or man-sex. The softcore NYSocBoy's Beefcake and Bonding, from the same blogster, took a quick look at Alan Steel once, but had no factually challenged sleaze to share.

Of course, our prime reason for popping Hercules against the Moon Men was the movie's muscular man Alan Steel, otherwise known as Sergio Ciani (7 Sept 1935 – 5 Sept 2015), one of the rare truly Italian slabs of prime beefcake that managed to jumpstart their film careers by hopping on the peplum wagon.* Originally a stuntman, Steel was the body double for the trimmed beard and smoothly chiseled muscles of that walking wetdream that was Steve "Droolable" Reeves (21 Jan 1926 – 1 May 2000 / see: Ed Woods's Jailbait [1954 / trailer] and/or R.I.P. Umberto Lenzi Part I and Part II) and soon worked his way to leading-muscle status, becoming one of the most familiar actors of the genre. Slightly more beefy than Reeves, and also looking slightly older (and thus more DILFy) despite being nine years younger, his thespian talents were nevertheless on-par with those of Reeves (in other words, not great), although unlike Reeves he tended to smile (unintentionally?) when things get really stupid in the given film he's in. A probably unintentional smile crosses his face a lot in Hercules against the Moon Men.

* After peplum, Steel did everything from proto-gialo (A… For Assassin [1966]) to drama (Addio mamma [1967 / music]) to spaghetti western (Fasthand [1973 / original trailer]) or the oddball amalgamation that is Lost Treasure of the Incas (1964 / scene) to agent film (the apparently lost Un colpo da re [1967 / song from the movie]), but retired after his final appearance in the sleazy and bonkers "erotic comedy" that is Baby Love (1979 / full movie at a porn site).

The plot: Despite being a Maciste cum Hercules movies, Hercules against the Moon Men probably owes as much to Edgar Rice Burroughs's Moon Trilogy as any given ancient mythological tale. A quick prologue explains how the city of Samar came to be under the thrall of a race of evil moon men,* residing in a volcano, who demand a continual string of the kingdom's children as sacrifice. They use the blood of the children in a ceremony to revive their dead queen Selene, but to date vainly. Evil Queen Samara (Jany Clair, below not from the movie, of Planets Around Us [1962 / full film] and Secret Agent FX 18 [1964 / full film]) is in cahoots, greedy to become the most powerful person in the human-depopulated planet the moon men plan once Queen Selene is revived. (Yep, another nutcase hot to rule a world in which there is nothing left to rule. Definitely a Republican.)

But there are some RINOs around. Chancellor Gladious (Nando Tamberlani [15 Jan 1896 – 11 May 1967] of Mole Men Against the Son of Hercules [1961 / full film]) sends for Hercules, who arrives on a white horse hot to trot to save the city and its inhabitants. When Gladious gets killed, his daughter Agar (Anna Maria Polani of In A Colt's Shadow [1965 / original trailer] and the a wasted life fave The Murder Clinic [1966 / trailer]) steps in to assist Hercules, obviously wet every time she looks at him. Evidently the attraction is mutual, for once all ends well that is well, the two ride off into the sunset to increase their ecological footprint together...

* Arguably, "moon man", as we only ever see one man in the same groovy gold mask, the rest of the aliens being the walking stone monsters that do his bid and call. 

Okay, much of the disjointedness of the narrative is surely due to lousy translating and all the cut scenes. The imdb lists the movie as 128 minutes long, while the Digiview release lists it as 88 — a difference of a full 40 minutes! This, of course, explains why some characters get introduced — a blonde prince, the commander of Queen Samara's army — only to completely disappear. (And, likewise, why we never see the mentioned Hercules vs monster fight.) The narrative, in other words, is neither smooth nor clear, but since all one only really needs to know is the good guys are against the bad guys, the narrative bumps can be ignored. Still, the extreme editing make the ending is a real head-scratcher: though it initially comes across as if nature goes wild and destroys everyone, including Samara, and that the four main good-guy characters (Hercules, Princess Billis, Prince Darix and Agar) all die when the volcano cave collapses, after a brief scene of nature in order it is revealed that all the good guys have survived. How they all got out of the cave (within which they were all stumbling about in different areas) is never revealed — one can only assume they were beamed out.*

* Actually, one must assume that that part of the movie fell to the cutting room floor when the flick went English. The movie still below, for example, is not from any scene found in the version of Hercules against the Moon Men we watched, but by the setting of the scene must have happened during or directly after the never-ending sand storm interlude.

Were the movie not so faded and scratchy, it would probably offer greater visual enjoyment, as sometimes the obviously cheap sets look at if they should look good. The subplot with Princess Billis as the key to Queen Selene's resurrection oddly negates the need of all the other human sacrifices, and one cannot help but note that her main squeeze, Prince Darix (Jean-Pierre Honoré of Vice and Virtue [1963 / trailer], Joy House [1964 / trailer], the possibly lost Sexyrella [1968, poster below] and The Blood Rose [1970 / trailer]) spends more time being rescued or recovering from his injuries than being of any help to his desired and endangered future wife. (That said, Princess Billis should have had a nude or topless scene; it would have improved the film greatly.) The high point of his involvement is that Darix leads an interminably long and sometimes funny but ultimately boring march through a sandstorm, a scene that overstays its welcome long enough to permit a pee break without touched the "Pause" button.

As cheap and low budget as Hercules against the Moon Men obviously is, the main moon baddie looks bargain basement but really cool, and the way his mask moves whenever he speaks is oddly disconcerting. The moving stone figures that are his beck-and-call henchmen look sort of dorky in a fun way to watch, and only truly manage to reveal their implacable dangerousness during the scene in which the conniving but not-too-bright Queen Samara meets her just rewards. Speaking of Queen Samara, one thing that the movie doesn't skimp on is fabulous costumes: alone among all the women of the movie, Samara parades one great out-of-this-world outfit and hairpiece after the other. Nothing like the impeccable sense of overwrought couture innate to fashion-conscious wicked queens to make one wish that women would dress like that in real life!

Let's make no bones about it: the main appeal of Hercules against the Moon Men is its camp factor. Even within the genre of peplum, it is not really a highpoint. But despite the occasional stretches of inertia, even a crappy transfer of the movie can be enjoyed if you are in the right frame of mind. We can only imagine that the restored, full-length version that apparently got released a few years ago would make the movie even more enjoyable, especially with the prudent use of the fast-forward button. Choose your poison — we definitely find this movie way better than arsenic.

While it lasts —

Hercules against the Moon Men:

Project Gemini / Zvyozdniy razum (Russia, 2022)

Project Gemini, a Russian semi-horror science fiction of an indeterminable but probably low budget, hit the DVD bins in the US in March 2022 and has probably since been degraded to the cutouts. The first feature-length genre fictional film of Russian genre director Serik Beyseu a.k.a. Seri Beiseu, who has since followed this project with two straight out horror movies — Succubus / Otrazhenie tmy (2024 / Russian trailer), which everyone confuses with R.J. Daniel Hanna's Succubus (2024 / trailer) but should not, and Whisper of the Witch / Zaklyate: Shyopot vedm (2024 / German trailer) — Project Gemini poses the question "Which came first, the chicken or the egg?" but ultimately fails to answer that question and many more.

 

"People won't suffer... because there won't be any people."

David (Dimitri Frid)

 

 

Scriptwriters Natalya Lebedeva and Dmitriy Zhigalov serve up a tale that often feels like one of those save-the-world-by-going-into-space science fiction films from the '50s but with elements of TV's Lost in Space (1965-68) and/or its first movie version in 1998, as well as Alien (1979 / trailer), if not some of that film's cheaper imitations, like Creature (1985) and/or Forbidden World (1982).* Project Gemini is also oddly redolent with some queerly out-of-date sexism and misplaced romance... not to mention that ancient concept that a man's death is somehow less tragic if the woman keeps the baby.

* The texture of the spaceship's wall padding definitely calls back the McD's Styrofoam to-go food containers used to pad the corridors of Forbidden World, a far trashier and more entertaining and much less dour Roger Corman-produced exploiter.

If the CGI and some of the model work are good enough to look big budget, the rest of the model work and a lot of the sets as well as some of the costumes convey the feeling that the actors probably had to pay for their own lunch while on set. The spacesuits they wear on the mysterious planet, for example, actually include a black knitted beanie, and space travel on the bridge of the spaceship seriously calls to mind the way it is shown on the original Star Trek [1966-69 / original promo*] series, where the characters "hold on" while the camera does the Watusi. Arguably, Project Gemini would probably look better on a bigger TV than on one the size of ours, but a lot would also look a lot faker.

* For your enjoyment: Van McCoy's disco version of the Star Trek theme and Deodato's disco version of the Star Trek theme.

Beyseu and Lebedeva and Zhigalove present an Earth on which mankind, as will probably happen in real life, has finally destroyed the planet's resources, a disastrous situation augmented by the appearance of a virus that is steadily killing all the greenery of the world. But luckily, sometime earlier a mysterious orb and spaceship of alien origin, obviously on Earth for billions of years, was discovered. Both seem to be the true creator of life on Earth, as the orb's very function is to convert inhospitable planets into life-friendly ones — no Adam & Eve in this narrative. Scientists use the discovered technology to build a rocket ship and new orb, and an expedition is formed to travel to an appropriate exoplanet to terraform it for human life. (A crew which, much as in most science fiction films of your grandparents' day, is all male but for one female.) As to be expected, things go wrong and suddenly the team finds itself stranded at an unknown exoplanet with a dangerous mutated life form in their spaceship...

Trailer to

Project Gemini:

As long as Project Gemini follows the schema of a traditional 50s science fiction flick that most Boomers & Gen Xers grew up watching on local after-school TV programming, complete with its crew of generic faces that are hard to tell apart, it has an oddly retro vibe that makes it appealing, although it quickly becomes apparent that the movie is going to be saddled with unnecessary and uninteresting cisgender human relationship baggage. (Hot babes, the men leave behind, but mostly irrelevant to the story — other than the pregnant one, that is, but even her relevance is somewhat subservient.)

The movie does manage to pull the rug out from under viewer expectations twice, the first time the most successfully: much as in Psycho (1960 / trailer), the person you expect to be the hero of the movie unexpectedly exits the scene. (Adios, amigo.) Worse, his woman back home on Earth isn't pregnant — tragic.

The second time the rug gets pulled, well, we here at a wasted life did see it coming but it is actually rather an audacious doozy, one which brings up the chicken and the egg question and a dozen eventually unanswered questions. It also causes some crew members to become bad guys while others instead go the the noble sacrifice route. The latter includes the oddly unlikable and strident Steve (Egor Koreshkov), who is ultimately the true lead and hero of the narrative — and who also did leave a bun in his woman's oven.

Project Gemini is yet another movie that had the possibility of being really good but, in the end, never manages to move beyond tolerable, as is evident alone by the fact that its relatively short running time of an hour and 38 minutes feels way too long. (The movie definitely has a pacing problem.) The sappy flashback scenes are better suited for a Lifetime romance production, and the singular woman of the spaceship's crew, Leona (Martinez Lisa), may be a fit and lithe minority but is both barely a character and the only crew member that has an extended scene in their underwear (she favors sports gear).

As for Amy (Alyona Konstantine of Involution [2018 / trailer] and Black. White. Red. [2024 / trailer]), the only other woman of note to the tale, she is a bit of a shrew and baby-maker whose important and viable vaccine work gets mansplained away by Steve — though it and she prove essential late in the story. In turn, the monster-on-the-spaceship aspect sort of falls from the sky and, worse, is handled far too discretely. The whole monster storyline is so perfunctory and derivative that it truly screams for a far more exploitive, if not fully grindhouse, treatment, but in the end Project Gemini keeps its woolen knickers on and only offers one true money shot (a quick talon through a chest). Indeed, the crew spends more time fighting amongst themselves than they do fighting the tossed-in monster, which is definitely not good.

The dubbing, like the music, is perfectly acceptable, if sometimes flat.

Ultimately, Project Gemini is a perfectly adequate movie, particularly if you are not a demanding viewer or are stuck babysitting science-fiction-minded pre-teens, but it is hardly essential. Indeed, it is difficult to say that it is in any way special or truly has its own personality. Thus, if you have to pay for Project Gemini, make sure you get your screening copy either from the cutout bin or your local second-hand shop; we can't help but feel that the €1.50 we spent on our copy would've been better spent towards a beer.

The Ten Best in 2024

As regular readers of a wasted life know — assuming there are any — "Best of" is always relative at this blog as the films we give good reviews don't always show up in our end of the year round-up while films we trash do. Also, we watch so much crap that a list of "Ten Best" is often hard to come up with. 

But not for 2024: we may have had only 50 blog entries, of which only 37 were actual film reviews, but our "Runners Up" list nevertheless came to a full 11 titles. Of those 11, ten were made prior to the 21st century — so, for the sake of continuity, we have taken the only contemporary film off the list. (Reverse ageism, you might say.) To read our full, always overly verbose review of any given film, click on the linked titles.

And so, here they are, in no particular order: the Ten Best films that we here at a wasted life watched in 2024 that we bothered to write about — oddly enough, for a change many of them are actually "respected" films. And Sherlock Holmes also comes out well: three of the movies we've chosen come from Universal's classic Holmes and Watson series of the 1940s. About the only truly WTF film on our Top Ten List — the truly crappy film that makes the list only because it haunted our mind long after we watched it — would be...

 

 

 

The Naked Witch

(Planet Texas, 1961/64)

"Buchanan's The Naked Witch is not exactly the most exciting film out there, and it seems almost impossible that it took two people to put together a snoozer as dull and terrible as this turkey, but as crappy as this lump of extremely low-budget flotsam is, the movie does have an oddly surreal appeal, providing you are of a forgiving nature."

Trailer to

The Naked Witch:

 

 

Cry of the City

(USA, 1948)

"Beautifully filmed and tightly scripted, Cry of the City quickly grabs onto the viewer and doesn't let go until the final frames. The movie has no flab, and the twists are not always expected. The acting varies from excellent (Conte and most secondary characters) to uneven (Mature and Paget), and but for the expedient (if tensely staged) breakout and magic bullet, the events on screen remain firmly grounded in reality. The city of the film is a cruel one, one in which looking out for number one is the main rule and all that which is decent — family, love, friendship — has barely a chance to survive or remain uncorrupted."

Trailer to

Cry of the City:

 

The Body Snatcher

(USA, 1945)

"Fans of yesteryear's horror cannot go wrong with The Body Snatcher: it is an enthralling, well-made horror film that keeps you watching from the start until the end, ably assisted by some great direction and a fantastic Boris Karloff."

Trailer to

The Body Snatcher:

 

 

The Swiss Conspiracy

(Germany/USA, 1976)

"The Swiss Conspiracy is not, of course, a masterpiece of originality; indeed, much of what occurs in the movie occurs in other, similar movies. Still, it deserves some respect: the narrative is not lazy and there are clues along the way that allow an intrepid viewer to put together the twist."

Trailer to

The Swiss Conspiracy: 

 

 

The Price of Death / Il venditore di morte

(Italy, 1971)

"Without doubt, The Price of Death is a flawed (possibly even fumbled) movie, but it does stand out as an interesting anomaly: detective western flicks are even rarer than western horrors. As such, it remains, despite its unevenness and flaws, mildly intriguing and enjoyable. While hardly imperative viewing, fans of the genre could do far worse..."

Some music from

The Price of Death:

The London Nobody Knows

(Brexitland, 1969)

(Poster created by Richard Littler)

"It is perhaps rather aside the point to argue whether The London Nobody Knows 'works' as a documentary or not, for whatever flaws it might have, age has given the visual time capsule an amazing, eye-catching patina that makes it an absolutely absorbing watch."

 

 

 

Sherlock Holmes and the Spider Woman

(USA, 1943/44)

"Overlook [the] obvious but minor flaws and the obviously dated film is rather entertaining minor classic of arguably quality, the last especially when compared to some of the later films in the series. Regardless of whatever flaws, however, Sherlock Holmes & the Spider Woman is well worth watching."

Trailer to

The Spider Woman:

 

 

Sherlock Holmes and the Scarlet Claw

(1944, USA)

"In general, this installment of the classic Basil Rathbone/Nigel Bruce Sherlock Holmes & Dr Watson series, The Scarlet Claw, is commonly cited as one of the best of the series, if not the best. And, indeed, the programmer truly does live up to its reputation — with the caveat, of course, that you are one of the continually dwindling population that have a penchant (and the patience) for old movies of the prior century."

Trailer to

The Scarlet Claw:

White Zombie

(USA, 1932)

"This independently produced 1932 pre-Code horror film, eight years shy of a century old at the time of the writing of this entry, is a flawed but wonderful little gem that is unarguably of greater importance historically than it is watchable for those who are not partial to films of such age."

Trailer to

White Zombie: 

 

 

Sherlock Holmes & the Pearl of Death

(USA, 1944)

"While most aficionados tend to hold The Scarlet Claw (1944) high as the best of the Rathbone/Bruce series of Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson movies, we here at a wasted life tend to bestow that honor to this entry here, the ninth of the grand total of fourteen movies Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce were to make together as the bromance duo. It just has too much going for it, including an excellent supporting cast of favorites."

Trailer to

The Pearl of Death:

 

 

 

Turd of the Year*:

* Beating out the runners up, The First Myth: The Clash of Gods (China, 2021) & Force of Nature (2020).

 

 

Night Fright

(Planet Texas, 1967)

"[...] Although this public-domain movie is easy enough to find all over the net, there is really no need to search Night Fright out, for there is no reason to bother watching it. (Unless, of course, you happen to be John Agar completionist.) Night Fright is 100% non-imperative viewing."

Trailer to

Night Fright:

Rats on a Train / Kuang shu lie che (China, 2021)

Trains, planes and automobiles! There is no transportation vehicle with enclosed space that has yet to be deemed unfit as a setting for a horror movie. While Snakes on a Plane (2006) definitely begot Snakes on a Train (2006 / trailer) but may or may not have begot Flight of the Living Dead (2007) — or, for that matter, Quarantine II: Terminal (2011 / trailer) — and all may or may not have begot Last Train to Busan (2016 / trailer), there is little doubt that the roots of Kuang shu lie che (a.k.a. Rats on a Train, Junkrat Train, and Train Disaster) are deeply entwined with that far superior Korean fast-zombie movie.

Okay, there is nary a zombie in sight in Rats on a Train, and the infectious rat bites convey a deadly plague-like disease instead of a zombifying rabies virus (ala 28 Days Later [2002 / trailer], 28 Weeks Later [2007] or, closer to the rat bone, Mulberry Street [2006]). But much like the [extremely boring] Chinese wuxia flick The First Myth [2021], which simply beams the Marvel Avengers movies into ancient China and replaces superheroes with gods, Rats on a Train beams Last Train to Busan to, dunno, pre-Revolution rural China and replaces the unstoppable hoards of zombies with unstoppable hoards of flesh-eating rats. But while Rats on a Train is perhaps arguably no better a movie than The First Myth, it is at least far from boring in any way.

Trailer to

Rats on a Train:

And while Rats on a Train could have been a boring disaster — see: The First Myth (2021) — director Zhenzhao Lin manages to make an entertaining, interesting and at times rather suspenseful movie from the regurgitated storyline "written" by ZhongShuang Hou, the scriptwriter of the hilariously bad Zhongjí taifeng (2021 / trailer), and Shangfan Zhang. As China has slowly opened itself up to producing lowbrow genre movies, including horror movies, if usually with some oddly interlaced propagandistic elements, the unknown director Zhenzhao Lin has revealed himself, since around 2018, as a bit of a genre-film expert. From the almost-ambitious The Unity of Heroes (2018 / trailer) to the super-shoddy but mildly fun Snake (2018 / trailer) and Snake II (2019 / trailer) and Restart the Earth (2021/ trailer), to others with a bit more aspiration, like The Enchanting Phantom (2020 / trailer) — yet another remake of A Chinese Ghost Story (1987 / trailer) — or Monkey King: The Volcano (2019 / full movie), his movies have revealed a director who cares about his movies, regardless of how lowbrow, who could possibly work his way up to more "serious" movies (should he even want to).

Much of the appeal of Rats on a Train lies in its temporal setting, which makes the movie very much a period-set horror. Whether all the train cars are appropriate to the general timeframe of the story is open to question, but in general the movie does well in presenting its pre-Revolutionary China, a setting that does add a pleasing visual zing to the tale. One only wishes that a bit more care had been invested in the extremely weak and cheap-looking CGI. Even the first scene of rats simply scampering around a room looks fake and animated, but while it seldom gets any better in close-up, whenever the rats are attacking en mass things become effective (excepting, perhaps, when they start to build towers like the zombies in World War Z [2013 / trailer] or pour out of house windows).

The movie's main character is undoubtedly the stern father Su Zheng Huai (Chao-te Yin of Born to Be Human [2021 / trailer]), who is travelling [to somewhere] with his eldest daughter Su Wei (Yiyao Xia of Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen [2010 / trailer]) and young son Su Yuexuan (Chu Yuga). In the kind of chance encounter that only happens in film, on the train he crosses paths with his Prodigal Daughter Su Ling (Zhu Ya), who is engaged to a straight-and-narrow Imperial Army officer (Benji Xu [?]). Other secondary characters get introduced, sounds foreshadow what is soon to transpire, and the tension mounts as occasional false scares occur — and then the rats attack...

Like Last Train to Buson, a good portion of Rats on a Train does not happen on the train. After the initial attack and escape, the survivors are separated into two train cars, the infected and the non-infected, and a party sets off to the hospital in a town already ravaged by the rats to get the antidote. But even as the number of that group dwindles — naturally all tertiary characters without a name die — as they face almost insurmountable obstacles on the way to the hospital's storage room (located in a laughably over-the-top location that almost seems cut in from a harder, meaner horror movie), tensions rise among the non-infected as the arguments to cut and run (leaving the infected behind) rise. The latter scenes are a bit dry and predictable, but the final resolution is oddly satisfying.

The narrative does have its share of plot holes and narrative illogicalities — for example, that the rats that can't jump over boxes in one scene but can in another, or that the train already has rats despite leaving the first village just as the rats arrive, not to mention the somewhat illogical judiciousness of whom they attack — and, as already mentioned, the CGI is often (if not usually) amazingly cheap-looking. For that, however, the main and secondary characters are all clearly delineated from the start, both as stereotypes and as individuals, and there is more than the average amount of character development and growth in interpersonal interaction than generally found in most movies like this one, which strongly underpins one's interest in the characters and what happens to them.

Unlike many Chinese movies of its ilk, few of the actors in Rats on a Train ever lean too far into caricature, and the unexpected thespian naturalism is a plus for the movie. Rats on a Train warrants a watch, and not just those in a forgiving mood. It'll terrify the younger kids, if not scar them for life, and even if the movie is basically trash, it does have suspense and thrills, not to mention occasionally moments of heartbreak and emotion.

Ultimately, Rats on a Train is definitely lowbrow, and much of it is already very familiar, but it makes for a good cinematic ride and is definitely makes for a good evening's visual entertainment. Indeed, you'll probably enjoy it even as you recognize just how trashy it is.