Elaborate sets. Exquisite costumes. Historical consultants. All the hallmarks of an accurate period piece. But Austin filmmakers Carl Fry and Maxwell Nalevansky found the secret equation for creating the 2007 setting for their gonzo comedy, Rats! was surprisingly simple: haircuts, T-shirts, and post-rock deep cuts.
The film stars Luke Wilcox as Raphael, a bored teen in the bland subdivision of Pfresno whose world becomes an absurdist maelstrom of drugs, weird neighbors, pigs, backyard barbecues, out-of-control cops, and serial killers after he gets caught tagging a historic phone booth. You know, everyday life in suburban Texas.
After a successful theatrical run, the gross-out bizarro comedy launched on digital platforms this week, including an unexpected home with the horror specialists at Shudder. However, its mixture of stoner slapstick, action, schlock, and many, many severed hands makes it a suitable fit alongside genre-stretching movies like The Deadly Spawn, Rabid Grannies, and The Toxic Avenger. Fry said, “Because of some of the gruesome scenes, even though we look at it as kind of cartoony, people thought that the best fit would be on Shudder because they’re used to all the blood.”
“Plus,” Nalevansky added, “I think genre fans and horror fans are more open-minded in terms of what a comedy can be. Because of Street Trash and Repo Man, it’s not like horror fans only want to watch horror.”
“How do we make it truly feel like a period piece? … Ultimately it was T-shirts and hair.”
“And then the music, of course,” said Fry.
The haircuts were easy, with plenty of buzz cuts and fluffy fringes to be spotted, but the wardrobes were slightly more challenging but no less essential. “It was an era of T-shirts, and this is very much a T-shirt movie,” Fry said. He credited Three One G Records founder and San Diego hardcore hero Justin Pearson for going above and beyond in providing them with the right look for the time. “He sent us a package of a bunch of T-shirts and actually got shirts printed that haven’t been printed for 15 years.” Indeed, it was one of Pearson’s T-shirts that let Fry know they were getting the feel of the period right, a Some Girls shirt worn by Wilcox in the opening seat. “The moment he put that shirt on,” Fry said, “it transported me back to 2007.”
However, securing some T-shirts seemed like it was going to be a much less intimidating challenge than trying to get the rights to some of the iconic post-hardcore songs of the era from genre-defining bands like Thursday. Propaghandi, and the Blood Brothers. Turns out, getting the nod from indie bands on indie labels was a lot easier than it sounds, and the filmmakers credited music supervisor Alison Moses for connecting them with the right people. “They’re not going to tell artists ‘No,’” Nalevansky said. “They’ve been told ‘No’ for most of their lives, and now they get to be in the opposite seat. And luckily, they ended up liking the film.”
The Blood Brothers’ co-lead vocalist Johnny Whitney even moderated a Q&A screening in San Francisco, and the Rats! team were reminded of how similar indie musicians and indie filmmakers are, since both are underground and over-looked. Nalevansky said, “He told us that the Blood Brothers never got licensed a single time in a movie, and they were like, ‘Finally. Cool!’ I went, ‘That’s crazy. That never happened? They had big songs back then, songs that were on the radio.’”
However, the Austin community was just as supportive as the indie music scene. Fry said, “The crew was primarily built up off friends, and the cast was probably about 50% people who were already friends of ours.”
The DIY ethos behind Rats! came about in part because this was filmmaking of last resort. The duo was originally planning to make a feature version of their short “With Pleasure,” which Nalevansky called “our dream movie.” They had gotteb to the point of building sets in Alaska for filming, but two days before primary lensing was scheduled to begin, COVID hit and the world shut down. “We were beside ourselves and depressed for about six months, and then eventually Carl and I were like, ‘We just need to write something we feel we can make this summer for $10,000, for $200,000 dollars, for a million, for $50, for whatever money we end up with. We have a plan and we’re just going to make it.’”
That philosophy meant making the movie with what they had on hand. Using a new script inspired by their own life experiences (including getting busted for tagging), the film was mostly shot in Pflugerville. Nalevansky said, “It felt like it was probably what it was like filming in Austin in the Nineties. Knocking on people’s doors, they were excited that we wanted to film in the house. Restaurants were like, ‘How much do we have to pay you?’ and we’d be like, ‘We’re paying you to film here.’”
The cast includes a host of familiar figures from the wilder end of Austin’s filmmaking scene, like the instantly recognizable Pineapple Tangaroa (Drunk Bus) and John Valley (The Pizzagate Massacre), who shot his appearance as an enraged toy store owner in under a day.
But the biggest performance may come from one of the smallest performers: Danielle Evon Ploeger, a regular on Austin screens (Last Girl Standing, The Pale Door, #ATown) and stages (Oh Dragon’s Antigone) who goes completely haywire as the deranged Officer Williams. The movie begins with Williams at full pelt, spearing the much taller Raphael right out of his shoes, and only gets crazier from there.
Nalevansky called Ploeger’s role “the real all-star performance of the movie. … If she gave what was clearly 100% and we wanted her to give more, we had our own language. We’d just go, ‘More troll’ and she’d go, ‘More troll? Got it!’ and she would amp it up another hundred percent.”
Fry said the inspiration for Williams was “Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans Nicolas Cage, that completely unhinged performance. But what if that was Jodie Foster?” Like much of the cast, “Once we got to set it was just like that, ‘Just let Danielle go,’ and that idea got carried into the edit, trying to figure out how to work a scene – ‘maybe we just let Danielle do her thing.’ The less cuts for Officer Williams, the better, because the audience just wants to see Danielle cook.”
Rats! is available on Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV, YouTube, Google Play, and Shudder now.
This article appears in June 13 • 2025.
