Mulberry Street (2006)

I put off watching Mulberry Street because I wasn't sure if it was a zombie movie, so before I watched it, I read up about it. Some reviewers called it an "American remake of 28 Days Later" while others thought it was a response to 9/11. I didn't see either of those things in Mulberry Street. I just saw people turn into rat-people-zombies.

The movie is about a virus, and that virus does make people crazy, and those crazy people turn into rats and eat other people. Perhaps that's what they meant. Mulberry Street takes place in New York (home of 9/11), where rats are transmitting a disease to people, including a building superintendent who inadvertently spreads the infection in the apartment complex of former boxer Clutch (Nick Damici, who also co-wrote the script) who is waiting his daughter Casey (Kim Blair) to return home from the Middle East where her military service has left her with a scarred face. Could this be the 9/11 reference?

While Clutch prepares for her arrival, and Casey makes her way home, people start behaving strangely, and more rat-like.(Wait, are the rat people terrorists?) Eventually the rat-behavior of the crazies, manifests into full-blown rat make-up which, if you're looking for an early Halloween idea, is elf ears and hobo teeth. None of this is shown for too long in the cinema verite style that Mulberry Street was shot in, but it ultimately becomes the undoing of the movie as any mounting tension is released by the emergence of the rat-people. If people just went crazy and attacked, it wouldn't be as ridiculous, but Medici and co-writer and director Jim Mickle clearly wanted to be "different kind" of zombie movie, hence rat people. Trouble is, take away the rat make-up and a zombie movie is all it is anyway.

Really, there's no reason to shy from the conventions of the zombie genre. A zombie movie need only be entertaining, not a reinvention of the genre. On that note, 28 Days Later only required a few simple upgrades to change the zombie genre, but if "rat-person" is the new "running zombie" then we're in trouble. Do we need the infected to physically transform into rats or just act rat-like? The latter is more terrifying, while the former requires really great make-up that a low-budget film can't afford. The most redeeming aspect of the rat-person is that they can crawl in between walls, but Mulberry Street barely exploits that convention.

Nor does the film exploit its other original addition, when Clutch decides to go save his daughter by taping up his fists and heading into the infected streets, his fists his only weapon. It doesn't lead to much gore, but it was pretty unusual. Never in a zombie movie have I seen a character say, in words or context, "I can takes these muthas out with my bare hands." Take that lawnmower scene in Dead Alive!

Of course, Clutch eventually learns that boxing isn't necessarily the best method of disposing of the infected. Some of the toughest lessons are those that aren't terribly hard to see in the first place.

Mulberry Street starts out very promisingly but ultimately is only a mediocre attempt at a zombie film, and, to whomever saw parallels between the film and 9/11, not much of a metaphor. However, if our troops could walk the streets of Baghdad punching Al Qaeda in the face, they might be home already.