[HorrorScience] Mulberry Street (2006)

Reading time: 7 minutes

Qualification

Mulberry St

Year

2006

Duration

84 minutes

Director

Jim Mickle

Distribution

Nick Damici, Kim Blair, Ron Brice, Bo Corre, Tim House, Larry Fleischman, Larry Medich, Javier Picayo, Antone Pagan, John Hoyt, Lou Torres

Script

Jim Mickle, Nick Damici

In a previous issue of HorrorScience I have reviewed the excellent film Stake Land, which was directed by a new and promising director for the genre called Jim Mickle, who in turn also wrote the script along with Nick Damici, who is also the one who stars in that same vampire-zombie movie that I liked so much. On that occasion he commented that this was Mickle's second film, since his first foray into cinema as a director of a feature film was 4 years earlier with a film called Mulberry Street, and it is that film that I am going to review below.

Mulberry Street It is the beginning of the Mickle-Damici duo, which seems to work wonders and does not need a huge budget to make a quality product. As they did later, the film is directed by Mickle, starring Damici, and written by both. And also just as they would do again four years later, In this film they take a traditional concept of horror cinema and mutate it to turn it into something new.

It's a hot summer day in the slums of New York City, and it seems like the temperature is only continuing its rise on the thermometer. The residents of the apartment building at 51 Mulberry Street are in a bad mood due to the sweltering heat, complaining that their building is collapsing, that rent prices have gone up, that the cost of gasoline is rising, and that the war in Iraq is still not over. Something is happening in the city, but as always the problem does not become public knowledge until it is too late.

A rat attacks a passenger without warning on the subway, while another of these rodents bites a person in a Manhattan neighborhood. Something is happening with the rats. Apparently the constant decay of the city, the pollution and the extreme heat are causing the rats in the city sewers to not only proliferate but also become the start of something worse. As night falls, emergency groups are trying to control the outbreak of a virus that is spreading rapidly through the city, causing anyone bitten by a rat or a carrier of the virus begins to mutate rapidly, taking on the appearance and eating habits of rats, and beginning to see other people as food, as if they were some kind of half-human, half-rat zombies.

[HorrorScience] Mulberry Street (2006) — Retired boxer Clutch (Nick Damici), protagonist of this film and also co-writer of the script

The protagonist of the film is Clutch (Nick Damici), a retired boxer who lives in an apartment at 51 Mulberry and who anxiously awaits the arrival home of his daughter, who is a soldier returning from the Iraq war.

While state emergency relief groups and local authorities initially tried to prevent the spread of the virus by cutting public transportation services and closing roads, Manhattan was quarantined, with the hospitals full of infected people, and the streets converted into dangerous terrain due to the increasing number of attacks by infected people, completely overwhelming the police control capacity in the area. Clutch and some residents of the building realize what is happening in the city, but it is too late to escape, and they decide that the best thing they can do is gather supplies, work as a team and lock themselves in the building, securing all the doors and windows to not allow any rat-zombies to enter. They will nervously wait for the government to fulfill the promises they hear on TV and radio and send the army to control the situation and rescue the survivors.

During the course of several events that take place in the city, we will also see how Clutch's daughter approaches her destination, which is the building where the group of survivors is located, and luckily, being a soldier, she is physically and mentally trained to face what she will find when she arrives at the neighborhood where her father lives.

Mulberry Street It is a low-budget film and that is obvious from the beginning. However, this is not necessarily a bad thing, and in this case its director also knew how to use his low economic resources to his advantage, creating a group of characters that look like any real citizen of the city of Manhattan and not those somewhat artificial beings that we see in some other films. The camera moves a lot, the shots change constantly and we will have some extravagant angles that look experimental but do not clash at all with the whole, which is focused on creating a frenetic and realistic atmosphere. The characters are so well portrayed that they become the main attraction of the film., making you as a viewer quickly empathize with the group of neighbors at 51 Mulberry and worry about their fate more than that of the city or the origin of the virus.

Despite the low budget, in the film we will see some blood and unpleasant images, and the makeup work is done well enough to look realistic, especially the physical effects caused by the rat virus in those infected, mutating into that hybrid and deformed form between a human and a giant rat.

Mulberry Street It is not horror cinema for everyone, although contradictorily it has a much more realistic style than large productions, both in script and in the actors' performance and character development. Even so, I still recommend viewing it, and I consider it a breath of fresh air within the already stale zombie subgenre.

Some curious facts:

Mickle commented in an interview that for this film they had to put a lot of effort into the filming process of some important sequences, since they had to film them in the city of Manhattan, full of people moving around and without official authorization to film there.
The actors in the film are all friends, relatives or related in some way to Mickle, and they agreed to work for this film without remuneration.
Several of the characters that appear in the film are based on real people who live in that same building and that Micke and Damici know.