“Rats!” is Early-Aughts Stoner Madness
Let’s take things back to 2007. We were at the precipice of the Obama years, the first iPhone was released, and it was the year that Facebook and Twitter became the global, interconnecting sites we know them as today. The internet, as a whole, was thrumming with life. Websites had personalities and we were contributing to them in a tangible way instead of staring at the passive scrolling that are common now. Looking back at 2007 feels a bit like a fever dream, and directors Maxwell Nalevansky and Carl Fry take that hallucinatory feeling to an extreme extent in Rats!.
Set in Fresno, Texas, in an alternate, heightened 2007 reality of sorts, Rats! is a stoner absurdist comedy about graffiti artist Raphi (Luke Wilcox) who was thrown in jail for tagging a local landmark (a payphone). When he gets out, his mom (Elisabeth Joy) and a cop, Officer Williams (Danielle Evon Ploeger), tell him that, to make up for his arrest, he is going to have to spy on his cousin, Mateo (Darius Autry). Officer Williams believes that Mateo, a small-time drug dealer, is also a big-time nuclear weapons dealer. Raphi’s mom ships him off to Mateo’s house to spy, but Raphi is adamant that he’s not a rat.
courtesy of Rats!
A certain type of early-aughts internet humor shaped the adolescence of thirty-something millennials. As that generation, my generation, is getting older and making films, this distinct type of humor is now given a new life on the big screen. Films like FUCKTOYS, the short film Welcome to the Enclave, and Rats! blend the digital DIY sensibilities of the early-aughts with utter chaos. The impressive thing about all these films is that the madness they’ve created is purposeful. It’s easy to throw a bunch of weird stuff at the wall, not caring if anything sticks, but Rats! is clearly working toward a vision. Whether or not that vision is something you can vibe with is a different story, but for those who do, it’s a frenetic madcap odyssey across Fresno.
courtesy of Rats!
The look of Rats! is so perfectly attuned to the era of 2007. It was a time when photoshopping tools were slowly creeping into the hands of the general public. With all the power of photoshop, all people could do was crank up the saturation to a comical degree, so Rats! does the same. Mateo’s bubblegum-pink house is blinding and a stark contrast to the comic-book-blue of the sky. Fresno does not look like this, nor has it ever looked like this, but in the specific Hot Topic emo world of Fresno 2007, it’s exactly right. Rats! takes us back to a time when Invader Zim backpacks and black skinny jeans held up by studded black belts were all the rage. Even lead actor Wilcox looks like he stepped off the set of an emo version of Napoleon Dynamite. It’s a perfectly manufactured time capsule of a different time, sure to pull on the heartstrings of the elder emo millennials.
Rats! is edited like an early YouTube video, finding so much humor in the cutaways. Characters talk about Raphi’s art and how it’s his passion, only for the film to cut to mediocre doodles in a notebook. In a text description, that humor doesn’t translate, but when seen in the context of Rats! it’s so off-beatly humorous. It’s a film that is wholly distinct, a voice that is singular while also speaking to the chorus of voices that grew up plugged into the changing internet of the early-2000s. Rats! is a riot that crawled out of the depths of Warped Tour to arrive on the doorstep of the 2020s in the best possible way.
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