COME, MUSE, AND LET US SING OF RATS!: Movie reviews.

Actually, only two of these movies involve rats. But two is enough, don’t you think?

The Rats: The Hulu description promises killer rats at Christmas! That would’ve been awesome.

In fact, the Christmas element is virtually absent. I have no idea why it was even introduced. Why not rats in Christmas trees, rats attacking Santa, rats in church? Gremlins did much better with this movie’s attempted anti-consumerist theme (although Gremlins also cast that anti-consumerism in Pat Buchanan xenophobic terms, so hey, what you lose on the dogs you gain on the ponies).

Nonetheless, this is an ’80s horror movie about killer rats in New York City which does not analogize street criminals and vermin. For this lack of creepy, bourgeois good-people dehumanization alone, it is to be commended.

It’s also kind of hilariously delicious.

If you only want one killer-rat movie, I’ll still recommend the Willard remake (haven’t seen the original yet). But it turns out that I want multiple killer-rat movies; and this one is serviceable.

Welcome to the Dollhouse: Okay, I really hated this. But it’s entirely possible that I missed the point, so I welcome arguments in my email inbox.

My main problem is that its genre- and tone-shifting didn’t work for me. It felt as though it just switched randomly from genre to genre, rather than genuinely combining genres. In the terms of this post, it was Harry Potter, not Veronica Mars.

I was in the market for an intensely painful satire of high-school hell. Maybe some kind of combination of Heathers, Cruel Intentions, and Donnie Darko–the Grand Guignol of bullying, something which would make the audience complicit, or else maybe make the realistic portrayals of bullying seem just as absurd and degrading as the fluorescent, lamb-dressed-as-mutton-dressed-as-lamb fashions. Maybe something like this article translated to Suburbian.

Some scenes really did that. Dawn’s costumes; her locker; the bathroom scene. But then you have the idiotic “Lisa Simpson bonds with Nelson Muntz, after he threatens to rape her” scene; and the kidnaping plotline, the reason for which I cannot fathom.

If other people get it, get how this movie hangs together and does something not merely groundbreaking (because I could probably buy that) but artistically great… email me, for real, because I did feel like I was missing something. Were my expectations wrong, or too specific? Did I miss the point of the kidnaping thing? I’ve been wrong in my first impression of movies before. But I genuinely didn’t get this.

Arachnophobia: Heh, this was fine. Bog standard ’80s spider horror; does what it says on the tin. Nice “city vs. country” storyline, in which although the city wins, there isn’t any sense of contempt. Overall the story handles lightly a lot of elements which could become really heavyhanded, e.g. gender role reversal (the husband needs the wife to kill spiders), or “never ever ever move away from where you live, or travel anywhere else.”

It may not affect others this way, but I definitely found myself a bit freaked out by shadows and similar possibly-spiders! after watching this.

Graveyard Shift: Based on the Stephen King short story, which is better. Creepy mill is creepy; filled with rats; needs to be cleaned; cleaners discover horrific Rat Queen hiding in basement. I had fun with this, because I love “out of the past”/coverup/creepy old building stories, but it’s really Session 9 without the good parts.

And wow, the Rat Queen is risible. Sorry, Rattus!

You can kind of tell my problem with the movie when I say that there’s a scene where someone discovers all the old mill files which have been relegated to the basement–and all I wanted was for us to get a look at the horrors hidden in those files. Those files are Annie Wilkes’s “Memory Lane” book; they’re Jack Torrance’s memories of the speech-and-debate tournament from The Shining; they’re Jame Gumb’s basement with the uneven floors.

We don’t ever get to see what’s in them.

Anyway, the close-credits song is hilarious–different lines from the movie remixed to a dance beat! Listen to it here (with the end of the movie, so spoilerous). Best part of the movie by far.