Mulberry Street (2006)

Let's give new director Jim Mickle's Mulberry Street an A for effort but unfortunately brand it with a C for execution. I usually deplore such graded reviews since they invite comparisons (I'd certainly give The Dark Knight an A for effort, but that in no way equates it with other As for effort), but here it seems appropriate.

One of a string of recent "experiment films" in the horror genre, Mulberry Street is an update of sorts of the zombie genre. Here the zombie infection is spread via rats in a soon-to-be-abandoned tenement home on Manhattan's Mulberry Street. The tenents end up fighting for their lives while holed up in a creaky building that is bound to have a few infestations; chief among these characters is Clutch (Nick Damici, co-writer with Mickle), who's expecting his daughter Casey (Kim Blair) to return home from the war today of all days.

I give this one an A for execution because rats scare the jeepers out of me. Anything with gnawing teeth and an irritating squeak just rubs me the wrong way, so I'm glad someone decided to give government bioweapons and biological mutations a rest. The overall creepy factor of swarms of rats succeeds here, and the gore that's becoming more prevalent in horror films is effectively used here. And fairly fresh face Damici has a lot of potential as demonstrated by his tough yet compassionate and endearing turn as Clutch.

Yet the movie drops the ball in a lot of places. Jump moments - my favorite part of any horror movie - are almost invisible, predictable when they occur and absent in most places where they should be. The cinematography has been praised for being realistic and documentarian, but I found it overly shaky and blurred, feeling a lot like watching video game animatics rather than combat sequences pitting human against rat-person. And, Clutch aside, most of the cast falls into empty cliche territory, feeling like good ideas but without the characterization to adequately explain their purpose in the plot.

The hallmark of any good horror film, furthermore, is twofold: a strong message and a gripping ending. Unfortunately, Mulberry Street is lacking in both. The movie hints somewhat at themes of eminent domain (anti), the war in Iraq (pro), and perhaps even AIDS - the latter of which relies on some muddy subtext that other bloggers have picked up on moreso than I did. As for endings, Mulberry Street practically steals from Night of the Living Dead without the creativity, imagination, or irony that the 1968 groundbreaker had.

Skip it, dear readers. Let me know if there's any really good horror movies out there that I haven't seen just yet!


The MPAA rated Mulberry Street "R for creature violence/gore and language." Gore is abundant, as is some objectionable language that gives the film an authentic Big Apple feel.