My partner Nick and I have very different tastes in film if I'm completely honest; I traumatize him with my films more often than not. He refuses to watch Asian horror with me after Audition, has sworn never to even visit Australia after seeing Wolf Creek, and while his views on French horror are mostly ambivalent (mainly due to a Jean Rollin phase I went through a decade or so ago) I suspect that would change if I ever showed him Frontière(s). Basically, he and I rarely like the same films when it comes to horror, and so a film has to be something pretty special for the both of us to like it.
Mulberry Street is one of those rare movies.
Mulberry Street, also known in the UK as Zombie Virus on Mulberry Street and in our house as Clan Moulder Take Manhattan, is a low-budget indie horror film set in Manhattan and specifically in a run-down tenement building on the titular street. Construction work in the area releases a horde of mutated rats who start attacking people in the subways and on the streets, infecting them with a virus that turns them into mutant rat-people (they're kind of like zombies if you squint and the filmmakers' original intent was to make a "back-to-basics" zombie film, but really they're mutant rat people all the way). The various residents of the tenement have to do their best to survive the night while Manhattan is placed under quarantine, hoping that the military will save them in the morning.
Mulberry Street is very much a character-driven movie, which serves it very well. Rather than focussing on the spread of the virus, its causes and/or the fight against it, the film instead centres on the various inhabitants of the area. There's Charlie and Frank, elderly brothers who have lived in the building for 53 years; Kay and Otto, a single mother and her teenage son; and our primary characters, Clutch, Coco and Casey. Casey is Clutch's daughter, returning home after serving in Iraq and being injured there; Clutch is a former boxer; and Coco is a gay black man who may or may not have had something going with Clutch in the past (more on that later). The movie emphasises the community that these people all share, how they band together when the rat-people start swarming the streets and eventually the building, and how they all deal with the situation in their own ways.
About Clutch and Coco... Honestly, whole essays could be written about their ambiguous relationship and it still wouldn't make things any clearer. The two men are obviously close friends, but whether or not their relationship has ever gone further than that is left (probably deliberately) obscure. There's definitely attraction there, at least on Coco's part, and a little bit of jealousy too, and their eventual fate certainly seems to lean towards the two of them having feelings for each other, but in the end it's never explicitly stated either way. This is actually a nice touch, as it further rounds out their characters - makes them seem more real.
Then again, all the characters are pretty solidly written.
Mulberry Street only had a budget of about $60k, so of course certain things had to be skimped on or improvised in the course of the filmmaking. Director Jim Mickle used carefully-shot footage of parades and July 4 celebrations focussing on the police and the barricades to create the illusion of Manhattan under martial law, and camera angles and clever lighting hides most of the sins of the make-up effects for the rat people - going for a more original take on the traditional zombie uprising is always refreshing, but it does mean more work in the special effects department and and sometimes the limited budget showed through.
Overall, we like Mulberry Street a lot in this house. I've seen some people make comparisons (unfair ones at that too) to films like 28 Days Later, but if I was to compare it to any other film, it would be [rec], which has a similar setting, plot and claustrophobic feel, even if the two films are shot very differently.
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