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On May 21, Bruno Mattei died. He was the director of uncounted low-end Italian exploitation films, occupying a niche of horror and sex (frequently both) not unlike that owned by Joe D’Amato. It would be stretching the truth rather too far to say that he left us some good films, but he did leave us some entertaining ones. Viewers wanting a taste of his work should steer clear of Hell of the Living Dead, a zombie film that unfortunately is as dull as it is ludicrous. But Rats: Night of Terror (1983... out on DVD from Anchor Bay) is a different animal altogether, and as party movies go, this one is hard to beat. Be warned now, there are spoilers ahead. If you want to hit this film cold, stop reading now and go track it down.

A barely comprehensible crawl informs us that we are some two centuries after nuclear war. Our heroes are a group of bikers foraging for food and shelter in an unnamed metropolis. The movie is nothing if not a shameless pastiche of other (wildly disparate) flicks, and our first bit of artistic theft is from The Road Warrior. Or, at least, that is what the audience is meant to think. But these bikers are hardly threats either to Mad Max or to the Humongous. Their costumes are so varied and silly, they appear to have been lifted from several different movies. Add in the fact that, in this post-apocalypse world, copious amounts of hair care products and eyeliner are still available to both men and women, our bad-ass group appears to consists of Chuck Norris, Olivia Newton-John, Janet Jackson and the Village People.

It has been a commonplace for quite some time now to take for granted that the B-movie, as we used to know it, has died. The types of stories we used to get in those films, from, for the sake of argument, the 30s to the late 70s, have been taken over by the blockbusters. So we get the same narratives, but with budgets in excess of 100 million dollars. So not only has the B-pic lost its turf, but it has also lost its natural habitat. The drive-in is almost extinct, and anyway, it is almost impossible for such films to...achieve any kind of theatrical distribution at all.

But the form isn’t quite dead. Roger Corman, king of the Bs, saw the writing on the wall some time ago, and shifted his focus almost exclusively to producing product for home video and cable TV. That is where the B-movie now resides. And while much of that product is deservedly maligned (does anybody really deserve to be put through another Jim Wynorski film?), and equally deservedly consigned to the remainder bins of video stores, let us reconsider our instinctive bile for a moment.

I’m going to run the horrible risk of coming across as the worst sort of “in my day” fuddy duddy this week. Oh well, he said, with a philosophical shrug of the shoulders.

So we’re a mere matter of weeks away from the release of Hostel: Part II, and no doubt another round of handwringing and analysis in the mainstream media about the popularity of the torture film (if the movie does well) or a celebration and analysis of its demise (if the flick bombs). Now, let’s be clear, I had a hoot at the first f...lm (laughing rather more than my companions were entirely comfortable with), and I’m cautiously looking forward to the second (Eli Roth is a talented filmmaker, but I’m not yet convinced he has sound judgment in all things, and his treatment of female characters in the new film will be something of an acid test).

Personal confession time, though I doubt I am entirely alone in experiencing the following. One of the odd side-effects of the fact that, sooner or later, EVERYTHING is making its way to DVD, is that some of that some of the more deliciously sordid mysteries of one’s youth are fading in the harsh light of day. Nowhere is this more the case than in the realm of the exploitation film.

As I’ve mentioned in the past, I’m of an age that places me between two stools. I’m old enough to remember the grindhouses her... in Winnipeg, and the ads for the movies that played there (not to mention the disreputable efforts that screened in the more mainstream venues as well). But I’m young enough that there was no way I could see those films when they first appeared. Heck, I was in elementary school for the 70s. But the ads that appeared in the papers haunt me still. Now, many of those alluring/terrifying/both films are easy to watch, and in nice prints at that. While I appreciate the opportunity, I also regret discovering the disappointing reality of so many of these movies.