Much of Rodentz aka Altered Species could've be made by using the script from Mimic. It has nothing original about it.

It's about lab rats that escape into the New York sewers & reproduce, displacing "normal" rats as they spread their territory. Their first vile act is oh-my-god to conquer & poop all over a department store. Management immediately hires the most heroic vermin-exterminator in the yellow pages.

These rats are (big surprise) extra intelligent & they like to eat (another big surprise) human flesh. Only the Heroic Exterminator stands between them & the destruction of the whole city, while the Government stands by in denial (how deep is that).

It sounds like a set-up for a comedy making fun of bad horror films, but it takes itself rather seriously. For a sub-genre of killer-rat movies such as are usually ultra-stupid, this one is perhaps a half-peg above, competently acted & entertaining, which is not the same as being on any level consequential. It's beyond trivial.


Watched Rodentz alongside the telefilm Ratz, which made for an amusingly ridiculous double-bill.

Ratz is about boy-crazy school girls (Vanessa Lengies & Caroline Elliott) whose pet rats Scooter & Spike get turned into hunky handsome naive boys (Jake Seeley & Levi James). Hooboy is it silly, but funny enough I was surprised how much I liked it.

It was nice to see a film that for a change recognizes that rats can be pretty sweet & make good pets, & it's just wacky-strange to see such adolescent erotification of pets.


Ratz is kind of the junior high school chickflick version of the dufus dorkass film Weird Science about ultra-geeks (Anthony Michael Hall & Ilan Mitchell-Smith) who are disgusting to girls, so they make themselves an Artificial Intelligence Genius Super-babe (Kelly LeBrock) programmed to like them lots.

Without losing its completely juvenile appeal for the sexually frustrated & naive masturbating boy, the story works itself out with a suprising dose of ironic comedy, as the hot babe adheres to her programming to "like" the boys while at the same time achieving autonomy & making her own decisions about what best would serve their needs.

So in spite of being an amazingly stupid film about purported geniuses, it comes off quite a bit better than just a childishly tween sex fantasy.