Past Misdeeds: Bram Stoker’s Burial of the Rats (1995)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only  basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

The 19th Century. Young Bram Stoker (Kevin Alber – the less said about his performance the better) is travelling through France with his father (Eduard Plaxin), who isn’t too fond of his son’s plans of becoming a writer. We’re horrified to imagine what the old man would say if he knew Bram’ll actually make things worse and go to the theatre, possibly living a rather bohemian life (for his time and place). Things take a turn for the more exciting when their coach is attacked by three hooded figures. When Bram shoots one of his attackers, the remaining two pack him into a handy sack and take him to their headquarters.

There, it turns out our hero hasn’t been abducted by random robbers but by an all-female krypto-feminist thong wearing cult of women of varying craziness whose major goal in (cult) life is to make men pay for all the evils they committed. And then some. They are led by The Queen (an excellently scenery chewing Adrienne Barbeau), pipe player and commander of an absurdly tiny little horde of flesh-eating rats.

Things would look rather dire for Bram, if not for the fact that one of the Queen’s favourites, Madeleine (Maria Ford, to nobody’s surprise quite underdressed and as always at least passable as an actress), falls in love at first sight with him once his head loses the sack. Our hero’s situation further improves when a plan of Madeleine’s former girlfriend Hope (Olga Kabo, also doing a good bit of scenery chewing) to kill him during the raid on a monastery not just fails, but also quite accidentally finds the Queen learning of and appreciating his literary talents in the aftermath. Why, to have one’s own cult chronicler…

So all would be set for a very special kind of happy end, if not for the evil plans of Hope and the just as evil ways of the French police.

Roger Corman never was one to miss an opportunity for weird international cooperations, particularly when they could bring him more bang for his buck, so it’s not a complete surprise we find him here indulging in one of a handful of co-productions with Russia’s ailing Mosfilm. The project certainly was not a prestigious business for the Russian side, but for Corman - and Burial of the Rats – the Russian involvement brought quite a bit of production value with it. This includes an excellent and often very inappropriate – it’s sounding like it was made for some romantic high budget epic – music score by Tarkovsky regular Eduard Artemev as well as some real talent behind the camera, and much prettier locations than Corman usually could get his hands on at this point in his career.

Of course, Corman being Corman, he used the opportunity offered to have director Dan Golden create this sleazy weird-ass adventure movie with a bit of gothic horror, a smidgen of gore and some comparatively subtle moments of “so that’s how Stoker got his ideas!”. The last, we can probably ascribe to co-writer Somtow Sucharitkul (who had a bit more success as a horror writer than he did as a script writer, even though I’m not a fan). There’s more gratuitous nudity than you can shake a stick at (sorry, Siegmund) - some of it provided via the sort of naked jazz dance all strange female cults love so well be they satanist, feminist, or yuggothian –, moments of puzzling weirdness, and many a scene that I would be tempted to call “swashbuckling” if anyone involved in the film had only known how to actually do swashbuckling action scenes well. On the other hand, there’s a scene where a monk’s nether parts are eaten by rats, so there’s that.

This still being a Corman production before he completely jumped the shark(topus), the Burial of the Rats is silly, awkward, of dubious morals but also still trying to be an actual movie despite all the feminists with swords and thongs, so plot and characterization make a degree of sense – at least in a world where this whole rat women business is appropriate – and the film’s not as anti-feminist as most films of its type would be, though all the gratuitous nudity will still keep most fans of identity politics away.

Why, sleeping with Bram doesn’t seem to impede Madeleine’s ability to think or fence (much), and while every female character here dies the same lame death, and their revolution will not be televised (spoilers, I guess), the film does have way too much fun with showing nearly naked women kill deeply unpleasant men I’d think it pretty impossible to ever imagine it tries to convince you women fighting back is a bad thing, particularly not when these women are fighting authority figures as deeply unsympathetic as those shown here. Because seriously, what film would be sympathetic to rapist monks and purveyors of child prostitution? At worst, and I know some Internet feminists of a very specific type might be annoyed by this sort of thing, the film argues that acting against men as if they were a faceless mass not worthy of individual consideration isn’t any better than men oppressing women in various ways.


Of course, as luck will have it, this is also the ideal position from which to make an exploitation movie about thong-clad 19th century rat women fighting oppression. Go figure. And as luck will also have it, that’s a very enjoyable thing to watch.