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The Rats Are Coming! The Werewolves Are Here!

Director: Andy Milligan Run Time: 91 min. Format: 35mm Rating: NR Release Year: 1972

Starring: Hope Stansbury, Jacki Scarvellis, Berwick Kaler, Joan Ogden, Noel Collins

The Deuce keeps the Halloween hoots rolling into November and whets your appetite for Thanksgiving with a feast fit for both: THE RATS ARE COMING! THE WEREWOLVES ARE HERE! Our perennial Deuce fave freak madman genius Andy Milligan’s mash-up Mulligan-stew of costume melodrama, monsters and mayhem! And mother-hating! Misanthropy and Lycanthropy!!

A “Victorian England” tawdry tenement-bound gathering of the Mooney family to meet daughter Diana’s fiancĂ© reveals a fearsome family secret… eventually… maybe in the last reel… but the title + family name should be enough to clue you in… Until then, it’s all screaming nastiness between the nuttiest buncha fake-Victorian “Brits” imaginable… unimaginable even! Swathed in strange Milligan-made “period” costumes… engaging in strange games of power and manipulation… literally spitting venomous vehemence in each other’s faces! Spiraling, unending diatribes of dislike! Actors cackling dialogues as if to the rafters of the local theater! Emoting emotions!! And with a dunce of a brother chained in a room of chickens to spice things up!

And what about those rats?? They’re coming!! Story goes that the Staten Island auteur’s long-time penny-pinchin’ producer, William Mishkin – who never gave the guy more than a pittance to deliver a picture anyway – made Milligan add rat scenes to his already “finished” film (then titled Curse Of The Full Moon) with the idea of “cashing in” on the then-current craze for the rodents – riled up by the likes of Willard and Ben – one of the many pleasures of “TRAC! TWAH!” is in witnessing the delightfully hate-filled way he went about it – with no attempt at fitting them into the plot in any way and basically making the rat scenes just literally torturous to watch – only adding to the overall bewildering bizarrity of the whole whatsit!!

Wander off-Deuce with us bozos on up to West 49th’s The World Theatre for this wacky wonder and maybe you’ll “Win a free rat for your mother in law!”

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