A movie about a mutant colony of dog-sized rats tearing up early-'80s Toronto, directed by the guy who made Enter the Dragon and Black Belt Jones, with a special appearance by Scatman Crothers? Hell yeah, brother. Deadly Eyes is a sterling example of "this shit rocks" cinema. I had a great time with it.
A 21st century movie about large rats kicking ass in a big city would star several generically attractive and interchangeable snoozes who would say things like "so that just happened" after CGI rats attacked them from 38 different camera angles against a dimly lit, puke-brown-and-yellow color palette, but we used to live in a world that occasionally worked seventeen percent of the time, so Deadly Eyes looks like a proper killer rat movie that doesn't make me yell "get off my lawn" at the TV screen. Deadly Eyes also gives us plenty of local Toronto flavor, visually interesting locations, a varied cast (middle-aged divorcees, 29-year-old high school students, health department officials, the mayor, elderly academic rat experts, party animals, bowlers, moviegoers, and train-obsessed children), and the brilliant and hilarious decision to put rat costumes on dozens of dachshunds (animatronic rat puppets are used for the closeups).
City health inspector Kelly Leonard (Sara Botsford) decides to finally put an end to a careless entrepreneur's open storage of enormous piles of grain near the docks on the edge of the city. The steroid-treated grain is being transported overseas, but, in the meantime, has attracted a large colony of rats nesting inside it. No one yet knows that the repeated ingestion of the steroid grain has powered up these rats to dachshund size and also made them violently aggressive with rat-style 'roid rage. Kelly lets the grain-storer know she has condemned his grain and ordered its burning. Already on the scene is health department employee George Foskins (Scatman Crothers), and he's holding an orange cat (the Scatman has become the Catman). It's a killer rat movie, so things don't go well for the cat, though he shows some excellent acting skills in the few minutes before the rats eat him. Here's to you, little buddy.
After the grain is burned, the colony disperses to the Toronto sewers and begins to rain hell on the Ontario capital. The first target is a group of 29-year-old high school party animals hanging out at the temporarily parent-free home of two of their pals. One of the gang, Trudy White (Lisa Langlois), tired of her immature boyfriend, is obsessed with the idea of seducing one of her recently divorced teachers, Paul Harris (Sam Groom), who is also the boys' basketball coach. Even though this is the early '80s, Paul knows this is a bad idea and urges Trudy to forget about her crush on him and date someone her own age. This just makes Trudy hornier and more determined to bust some age-of-consent laws, much to Paul's annoyance. Anyway, one of the two party house siblings, Hoserman (Kevin Foxx), irritates the neighbors and his older sister by playing air guitar on a floor sweeper to deafeningly loud Canadian power pop while everyone drinks beer and smokes. The power pop wakes up their toddler younger sister, and big sis decides to hang back and take care of the kid while the others leave for a burger run. A bunch of giant rats decide to ruin the sisters' night.
The rats move on from adult teens and toddlers and start creating mayhem all over the neighborhood. George reluctantly explores the sewer to see what's up with all the rodent damage calls they've received and unfortunately encounters the colony (the Scatman has become the Ratman).
The rodents soon unleash hell in a bowling alley, a movie theater showing a Bruce Lee marathon (the rats attack during Game of Death, another Clouse film that was a pieced-together hodgepodge of 11 minutes of the movie Lee was filming when he died, older Lee films, a Chuck Norris movie, and new footage shot to roughly tie the mess together), a university archive, and the Toronto subway during the dedication of a new subway line with the mayor in attendance. These are all cinematically fantastic rat-attack locations.
The whole movie is well-paced, fun, exciting, and exactly as silly as it needs to be. I like the ensemble cast approach and the sense of living, breathing community created by the variety of the characters' ages and professions, their interactions with each other, and the location shooting, and I miss this lack of atmosphere and setting in most modern genre films.
Deadly Eyes is the second of director Clouse's two horror films and shares its when-animals-attack premise. His first, 1977's The Pack, was about a pack of killer dogs terrorizing vacationers (led by Joe Don Baker) on a South African island. He also directed the post-apocalyptic sci-fi cult film The Ultimate Warrior, about the terrible post-plague future we're facing in 2012 (only eight years off). Aside from a couple of children's movies for the Disney Channel, Clouse otherwise specialized in action, with a particular focus on martial arts. Besides the previously mentioned Enter the Dragon and Game of Death with Bruce Lee and Black Belt Jones with Jim Kelly, Clouse's other films include The Amsterdam Kill with Robert Mitchum and Leslie Nielsen, Battle Creek Brawl with Jackie Chan, Force: Five, Gymkata with Olympian gymnast Kurt Thomas (maybe the only gymnastics-themed action movie??), and the China O'Brien movies with Cynthia Rothrock. He also directed something that sounds indescribably nuts, Golden Needles, starring Joe Don Baker, Elizabeth Ashley, Jim Kelly, Burgess Meredith, Ann Sothern, Roy Chiao, and Frances Fong, about an international fight to gain control of a statue filled with magic needles, which either cause superhuman sexual prowess or death, depending on where they're inserted. There's no way it could be better than any of the versions we're imagining, right? Has anyone seen this?
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