The Cutting Room Floor: Mulberry Street
As one of the Horrorfest: 8 Movies to Die For the film Mulberry Street takes place in a run down apartment building in Manhattan. Starring Nick Damici, Kim Blair, Ron Brice and Bo Corre. Mulberry is shot in a gritty, realistic low budget style in the vein of 28 Days Later.
The plot is simplistic, a disease runs rampant through Manhattan. It starts in the subway tunnels and back alleys. People are being attacked by rats. Those who are bitten become ill and the tension begins to mount as those who are infected begin to attack those who are healthy. As the movie progresses it veers away from the zombie movie feel by revealing that rather then the infected dying from their wounds they’re being transformed into rat like creatures.
It doesn’t take long for the film to pull back from the overall picture to the tenants of the apartment building on Mulberry Street. The retired boxer, his daughter, returning from the war, her face scarred from shrapnel. The flamboyantly gay next door neighbor who helped to raise the girl and the waitress and her son who live on the next floor up. Mix in a handyman who spends too much time in the basement and an old man who is bedridden and breathing off of an oxygen tank and you have an ensemble cast of blue collar and lower middle class people struggling just to get by day to day. It’s the perfect set up for an urban tale of terror and the struggle to survive.
Mulberry Street should be out soon on DVD with the rest of the Horrorfest films and was one of the better films from the week long festival of movies that After Dark put out. If you’re looking for big budget or name actors then Mulberry Street won’t be your cup of tea. However, if it’s a story that has you sitting on the edge of your seat and leaves you wondering just what’s going to happen then check this one out.
Richard Carroll is an avid movie viewer and all around fanboy. You can probably find him at his computer playing Guild Wars when not watching,writing, reading or roleplaying something (Oh and then there’s the real world and work). Check out some of his written works at www.ficofthedead.com. A website in need of a webmaster to ensure it gets updated. (Any takers? Anyone? *grins*)