Mulberry Street
In this modern age where your local theater is packed with nothing but unoriginal ideas and countless remakes, audiences have to turn to foreign and low-budget films for the most creative aspects of our beloved genre. Such is the case with a little film called Mulberry Street, from co-writer and first-time director Jim Mickle. Picked up by After Dark Films as part of their annual “8 Films to Die For” lineup, the movie has since received a lot of fairly positive feedback from those lucky enough to catch it while it made its rounds in various festivals. Although the general idea of a deadly infection taking over and turning a community against each other has been done before, it hasn’t exactly been done in this particle fashion.
So the story is set in a small apartment complex in Manhattan, where a group of survivors are held up after the rest of the city has been plagued by a strange outbreak, which turns those bitten by rats or other infected, into blood-thirsty violent rat-people. The movie is essentially a low-budget 28 Days Later on a smaller scale, and with their infected replaced by rat-people hybrids. I personally can’t recall many movies that I’ve seen involving rat-people, but from my knowledge the concept hasn’t been done much in the past. The movie never really has a dull moment. It starts off for the first 30-minutes laying down the idea that an outbreak is occurring throughout the city, via news reports and odd behavior from various people around the area. Around 30-minutes in it kicks into gear and the infected begin to “turn” and attack others, and really doesn’t let up until the credits roll.
Despite the budget, the make-up effects for the hybrids were fairly well done, although since most of the scenes are a bit dark anyway we’re never clearly shown a full shot of one of these infected. Most of the movie takes place within the apartment building, but there are a couple nice scenes involving survivors moving through the streets, especially when one of our leads (who happens to be an ex-boxer) uses his fists as weapons against these creatures. There’s another scene involving the daughter of the boxer who’s riding a bike through the torn and blood-filled streets, which reminded me of a similar scene in Maximum Overdrive (intentional or not). There’s a good amount of blood and a couple decent gore scenes, but nothing really worth mentioning.
Sadly, the movie’s script isn’t the best piece of work, as we’re left with a lot of plot-holes and unanswered questions. Like how exactly did this start and why does it turn people? Unless I missed something, I don’t think those were ever answered. Aside from that, another problem I had with the flick was the bad CGI during a brief fire and explosion sequence. Luckily, there are only two scenes that called for it, while the rest of the effects were handled by practical means. Had the movie had a bigger budget I can see it being a great film, but for now it’ll just have to settle for being “good”.
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