The Rats Are Coming! The Werewolves Are Here!

The 1970s gave us some really amazing horror films that have become classics like, The Omen, The Exorcist, Alien, Magic and Halloween.  The 70s also gave us movies with some wonderfully descriptive titles like, I Spit on Your Grave, Don’t Look Now, The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane, The House that Dripped Blood,  Let Sleeping Corpses Lie, and this articles subject, The Rats Are Coming! The Werewolves Are Here!. Unfortunately, the creativity of a name, doesn’t always translate to the quality of a movie, but sometimes what is produced is so amazingly bad, that it is almost fun to watch if only to poke fun at.

The plot of “The Rats Are Coming! The Werewolves Are Here!” has some potential.  In 1899, the eccentric Mooney family lives in their large English estate.  Pa Mooney (Douglas Phair) is sick and possibly dying and he depends on his children to take care of him.  Eldest daughter Phoebe (Joan Ogden) runs the household while son Mortimer (Noel Collins) handles the finances. Middle daughter Monica, is a sadist who loves torturing younger brother Malcolm (Berwick Kaler) who is a simpleton and more animal than man.  The family is expecting the return of their half sister Diana (Jackie Skarvellis) who has just finished medical school in Scotland where she met her new husband Gerald (Ian Innes). The family is angry at Diana for getting married without their permission, as she was supposed to return and help their father with his experiments in order to save his life.  The family also harbors a secret, they are all werewolves and will change during the full moon completely losing control, and if precautions are not taken, they could end up killing each other. All except for Diana who is “different” due to having a different mother.  Can Diana save her family and find a way to continue the Mooney bloodline? Watch and find out…or don’t…because honestly this movie was torture to sit through.

The production value is very low and felt almost like a theatrical stage production versus an actual film. The very staging of the film used theatrical instead of movie techniques.  The sound quality was especially bad and at times it was hard to hear and understand what the characters were saying. The scripted dialogue was horrible, being far too wordy and repeating the same information over and over and over again and the expositional information clumsily written. The acting was horrible being far too melodramatic with the two main male characters Noel Collins and Ian Innes giving the best performances, which isn’t saying much, and Hope Stansbury and Jackie Skarvellis give the worst.  In one scene the family is drinking tea, and you can see that the cups are empty.  Hope Stansbury, pretends to drink in such a completely unrealistic manner that I am wondering if she failed her intro to acting / drama 101 course?  Producer, William Mishkin also acted in a few scenes, playing two different characters, a gunsmith and a pawnshop owner. Both these scenes had too much dialogue, extemporary dialogue that added little to the storyline.  For a movie with the word “Werewolf” in the title, we get incredibly little werewolves on screen, saving their entrance until the very end of the film and the “Rats” play no real part in the plot.

This film was released in the United States in May of 1972, but the majority of the movie was filmed in England in 1969 back-to-back with other Mishkin produced movies (The Body Beneath, Bloodthirsty Butchers, and The Man with Two Heads) with some reshoots and additional scenes being shot two years later in Staten Island to pad out the short running time.  This amazes me as the movie felt like it was way too long, and it was incredibly wordy with much of the dialogue repeated several times.  Not intended to be a comedy, there were some definite comedic moments, much of it stemming from either the bad acting or the absurdity of the characters.  This actually could make for a really fun stage play, hyping up the melodrama and playing much of it for laughs.