Mindless virus-infected flesh-eaters take over the streets of New York City. You’re thinking zombies, but nope. These are RAT PEOPLE. Totally different thing because they’re slowly growing little tufts of hair on their ears and getting weird in the face. In other words, after being bitten by rats, people then start turning into rats. First-timer Jim Mickle directs the hell out of this one, getting up close and personal with the grizzled residents of a shabby tenement where killer rat people are just another obstacle in the day along with bad plumbing, long flights of stairs, cancer and new management raising the rent. Mickle works smartly around a low-budget make-up job with lots of shadows and quick cuts, letting the audience fill in most of the kill scenes with their imagination. He’s learned all of the right lessons from George Romero’s old Night of the Living Dead. We get normal, imperfect people, bartenders and blue collars, rather than clever heroes. The drama stays on a human level where everything boils down to basic survival in a world suddenly gone crazy and no one here has the time or the resources to investigate the larger problem. TV news is the only lifeline to information and it provides little. There are no scientists, no clues and no explanation, just a lot of blood and panic and running away and hiding out. For subtext, Mickle parallels the rat virus with urban gentrification, sometimes setting the carnage against posters of the smiling new real estate man who’s about to come in to buff out all of the character (and chase out the characters) of the old neighborhood. The rats beat him to it.