Also posted at http://www.revenantmagazine.com/)

mulberrySt
Having arrived back from this years Glastonbury festival I needed to remember the details of the film I watched before I went away. Now, I don’t particularly have any desire to re-watch it to familiarise myself as it wasn’t all that decent or apparently memorable either. However, I reached a compromise and just stuck it on fast-forward to speed through the 80 minutes in about quarter of an hour. It reminded me of some of the decent aspects of the film, but sadly also the ending, which surprisingly I had forgotten about considering I could see it coming from a mile away during my first viewing.

Anyway, Zombie Virus on Mulberry Street – simply Mulberry Street outside of the UK – centres around an apartment-block in New York, home to around half a dozen standard residents and a caretaker who has unfortunately recently been bitten by a mysterious undead rodent. In possibly the greatest moment of the film we see this caretaker transforming into a mutant Rat-man, a not too dissimilar scene to Jeff Goldblums ‘The Fly’. He then tries to munch on any of the residents he comes across. There isn’t much escape for the locals as numerous ratzombies are roaming about the whole city, so they hole up in the apartment to fend for themselves.

Now, while not officially zombies the rat-creatures are for all intents and purposes members of the undead, who were brought about by infection spread from rats (possibly due to some weird experiment conducted on a pet rodent by a Mulberry Street resident). The makeup effect of these creatures is pretty decent for a low-budget film, and in particular I loved the hairy little ratty ears the infected display. There is also some mild gore on offer, mostly just blood effect here and there though.

Mulberry Street does invoke a quite impressive sense of claustrophobia and tension for quite a lot of the film, but where it falls down is when the action scenes kick in. Maybe it’s the filming style of theses moments but any sense of tension that was built up pre-action is just blown away whenever anything actually exciting happens. People get killed and attacked and there’s just no interest when it does happen, and appears quite amateurishly handled. It’s a pity really because there are some really good moments here, but when the plot actually kicks in the film is just dull.

Sadly, this film doesn’t compare to the awesome Ratman although the rat-creatures do bear a slight resemblance to the diminutive Nelson De La Rosa, albeit much taller.

Gore Score D
Norks Score F
Originality Score D
Overall Score D-