Good, Great or Excellent?

Welcome back to the RetrOasis. Today, we’re digging through the digital floorboards to drag out a forgotten slice of early-2000s network creature horror that the streaming giants have completely ghosted.

I’m talking about The Rats (2002), a prime-time Fox TV movie starring Twin Peaks icon Mädchen Amick and Vincent Spano, directed by the late cult-horror veteran John Lafia (Child’s Play 2, Man’s Best Friend).

Loosely pulled from James Herbert’s nasty 1974 horror novel, the premise is quintessential B-movie gold: Susan Costello (Amick), an upscale Manhattan department store manager, discovers a rat problem in the dressing rooms. Not just ordinary sewer rats—a customer gets bitten and drops from Weil’s disease. Enter exterminator Jack Carver (Spano), who quickly realizes these aren’t your typical subway scavengers. They are genetically mutated, hive-minded, aggressive super-vermin with a weird taste for designer perfume, and they’re spreading from the plumbing to the transit tunnels to public pools.

Late-90s Fox Grit & An Unlikely Double on the Set of Dark Currents

Rewatching it today, The Rats is a solid, unapologetic creature feature. Lafia balances early, crunchy CGI with actual swarms of live, trained rats—delivering surprisingly gnarly TV gore, like an infamous subway car feeding frenzy that snuck past network censors. The chemistry between Amick and Spano holds the whole thing together, grounded by that distinct post-9/11 Manhattan atmosphere (shot mostly in Toronto, after being shelved for an entire year when the original September 17, 2001 airdate was derailed).

Now, full disclosure: I’ve always had a soft spot for rodent cinema and rats in general. In fact, this movie brings back wild memories from the trenches of my own early indie production, Dark Currents.

We had a scene in Episode 2 where an eccentric, wealthy recluse stalks and hunts rats inside his dilapidated mansion with a high-powered slingshot—and cooks them up. At the time, I had a pet rat named Ozzy. I wanted Ozzy on camera, but there was zero chance I’d put my own pet in harm’s way on a scrappy, micro-budget set. We planned to film Ozzy scurrying safely along the woodwork, and figure out the “kill” shot later.

The night before Ozzy’s big debut, my mother called. She had just moved and found a giant wild rat caught in a trap that she couldn’t bring herself to clear. When I went over to take care of it, I couldn’t believe my eyes: the wild rat looked identical to Ozzy. A morbid gift from the cinema gods. We shot Ozzy happily trotting along the baseboards, cut to the stunt double taking the slingshot hit, and roasted the double over an open flame on a stick. Ozzy retired to his cage that night with extra insect treats, completely unscathed.

(If you want to see that zero-budget practical magic yourself, track down a copy of Dark Currents—there is an original vintage VHS tape listed right now on eBay just in time for Halloween!)

The Streaming Blackout

Despite being broadcast into millions of American living rooms on prime-time television, The Rats has suffered complete digital erasure.

Platform / Window	Preservation Status
Major SVOD (Netflix, Hulu, Prime, Max)	Totally Absent
VOD Purchase / Rent (Apple, Vudu, Google)	Zero Digital Distribution
Physical Media	Out-of-Print DVDs (Boutique / Secondary Market Only)

Early-2000s TV movies exist in the worst corporate copyright crossfire. Broadcast rights expire, production houses get acquired or go under, and no algorithm sees profit in paying licensing residuals on mid-budget network genre flicks. Unless you grab the physical DVD from secondary sellers, this piece of 2000s television history simply does not exist on the internet.

The Verdict

It’s far better than the 2003 Willard remake, delivers genuine B-movie fun, and features Mädchen Amick holding her own against hundreds of live rodents. When corporate platforms sweep these cult favorites under the rug, physical plastic remains the only way to keep them alive.

Guard your shelves, grab your physical discs, and keep the pirate flag flying.