27.08.2025
RATS! (2024)
dir. Maxwell Nalevansky and Carl Fry, 85 min. English languageIn a distorted and surreal take on a small town in Texas in 2007, graffiti artist Raphael is arrested by the unhinged Officer Williams and sentenced to community service. His mother forces him to leave home and move in with his burnout cousin Matteo, who just so happens to be under investigation by the FBI for suspected possession of nuclear weapons as part of a plan to blow up Texas. Raphael now has to navigate around the long arm of the law, his mystifying cousin, and his small town full of maniacs if he ever hopes to get out with his skin and his sanity in one piece.
David Lynch’s BLUE VELVET crossed with a Municipal Waste music video and rendered with all the charm and sensibility of a Newgrounds flash animation. The stakes are comically high, the jokes and flamboyantly crude, and the pacing is frantic, all of which makes for uniquely modern and engrossing cinematic experience that presents a lyrical and loving look back on the dumbest, loudest, and angriest
perspective of the recent past. The supremely independent minded film makers skirt all the rules of the format to create a piece of extended sketch comedy that that’s brilliant blend of shaky improv and Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker style precision gags that shocks and awes the audience up until the very end. Also features a cameo from Nicolas Cage’s weirdo Nu Metal son Weston!