Jim Mickle's first big directing attempty look good. It looks interesting enough to keep you attention but it's not enough to cover some of the blandness of the story. The story had potential. It needed more horror either in terms of traditional gore or as events. It seemed to have too many characters juggling around for a low budget movie. They're in scenes that ultimately don't account for anything, so it lacked a direct punch.t also seemed a mistake trying to make outbreak big in scale because you need the vis also in the story to pull it off. It does have a localised feel which I suppose works.
Review by whitsbrainVIP 5BlockedParent2022-01-15T17:21:43Z
I put Jim Mickle's most recent film, "Cold In July", on my personal 10-Best list of 2014. With my viewing of "Mulberry Street", I've now seen the bookends of his directing career to this point.
I really wanted to watch "Mulberry Street" because I was expecting a claustrophobic, dirty tale of rats sneaking up on a few people in an apartment building. I was thinking it would be along the lines of Stephen King's "Graveyard Shift", but hopefully better than that mess. With fingers crossed, I found that I got a claustrophobic tale of dirty rats turning the people of New York into zombie rats that overrun Manhattan. Surprisingly, it turned into an apocalyptic story on a grander scale.
There really isn't an explanation given for the disease outbreak and it wasn't wrapped up at the end, either. The conclusion got a bit corny, but the remarkable thing was being drawn into the story despite some pretty rough acting by everyone but the likable Nick Damici. I noticed that Damici and Mickle wrote the story together which is very cool.
If you hate shaky cam, it was all over this. After all, the mid-2000's were prime time for shaking the camera around. It was a bit disorienting at times, but I did enjoy the exaggerated fast movements of the rat people.
This turned out to be a pretty appropriate thing to watch this Halloween season and it didn't hurt that it was a good movie, either.