RT Obscura, the exclusive bi-weekly column by renowned critic Kim Newman, sees the writer plumbing the depths of the Rotten Tomatoes archive in search of some forgotten gems. In his sixth column, Kim explores a Roger Corman-produced Bram Stoker adaptation featuring rats and naked women. Obviously.

In the early-to-mid-90s, the long-dead Bram Stoker picked up Q-factor points thanks to a quirk whereby Universal Pictures owned American copyright to the simple title Dracula, prompting Francis Ford Coppola to add a possessory credit to his 1992 film and claim it was officially called Bram Stoker's Dracula. A few direct-to-video schlock items, either genuinely or notionally drawn from the Stoker library, followed suit: Bram Stoker's Legend of the Mummy (from Jewel of the Seven Stars), Bram Stoker's Shadowbuilder (from a short story), and this conceptually breathtaking if prosaically-executed Roger Corman runaway production.



The title comes from one of Stoker's gruesome, still-underrated short stories (a curse of writing one single masterpiece is that it tends to swallow the reputation of everything else the author ever did) and refers to the practice of having toothy rodents reduce corpses to skeletons with piranha-like all-devouring ferocity. The plot, however, is new-made and almost-endearingly cracked. Sometime in the 19th Century, a long-haired surfer guy called Abraham 'Bram' Stoker (Kevin Alber) is travelling through France with his stern father (Eduard Plaxin) and occasionally whining that he'd rather be a writer than a dull official. As it happens, their coach is waylaid by a couple of 'rat women', who wear very 1995 thongs, boots and brassieres under their cloaks and are conducting raids against male oppressors in the region. Bram winds up a captive of the rat women, who are queened over by Adrienne Barbeau (in a role that evokes her turn in the wittier Piranha Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death) and apparently comprise put-upon rejects rescued from exploitation, drudgery or prostitution.



The Queen decides to keep Bram alive after some mild torture because he promises to write up their exploits as blood-curdling pamphlets which will spread their terrifying reputation around and put male readers off the idea of being mean to womenfolk. Our hero starts cuddling (in an achingly familiar softcore interlude set in a romantic dungeon) with the slightly soft-hearted rat woman Madeleine (Marla Ford), which gives her more militant comrade Anna (Olga Kabo) a bad case of jealousy that betokens sorry plot developments later. After raids on a hypocritical monastary and the local brothel, a mob of angry men track the rat women back to their vast but apparently unnoticed palace. Stoker's father is abducted by Anna and Bram has to fence deftly to save him, then the two female leads perform a spirited sword-fight while dressed in Victoria's Secret catalogue cast-offs. When the vile men force their way into the throne-room, the Queen opts for the 'burial of the rats' and has her pets scurry into her clothes and gnaw her down to a skeleton in a few seconds rather than fall into the hands of her enemies.