4 gibbles out of 5

Director: Steve Barron

Director Steve Barron’s other two flicks – Turtles and Coneheads – should give a good reference point for this film.  Both of those movies lean on weirdness without fully sinking into just making jokes at the expense of the weirdness, instead choosing to structure (or attempt to structure) real films around the subjects.  Now subtract the ties to a property and play up Barron’s Irish roots and you get “Rat,” an awesomely dry comedy about a man who turns into a rat.  While the story takes an overall typical “man learns to appreciate life” moral bent, its wayward route of getting there is impressive, as is how far off the path the story is willing to go when the rat’s human family decides to use their new pet’s story as a potential vehicle for media stardom.  The blending of puppetry and real rats is done exceedingly well, and Barron has a quirky eye for settings and camerawork that lends the whole story an appealingly unique feel.  The humor is, as mentioned, VERY dry, but the script finds a comfortable middleground between jokes regarding how easily everyone accepts this human-to-rat and how strange a human-to-rat is.  It stumbles around its conclusion a bit, and can’t quite congeal into a stronger point than the generic one, but “Rat” is such an excellent example of a family film that can play on several levels of enjoyment.