This is a terrible movie with one questionable virtue: the spectacle of dozens of real rats really shotgunned. It looks like they used a 20 gauge. It could be some kind of stunt, but nobody told the rats. Suggestions that the production used pellet guns on the rodents seem unlikely to me, as in my experience it takes a little more than .177 caliber to knock a rat off his feet.<br /><br />It is of course possible that there is a special effect involved; if so it's a technology I've never seen. Certainly these rats react violently to the projectiles that hit them, and they don't seem to like it. They are knocked end over end by bloody impact. Meat flies off the wounds, even. They seem hurt, and they squirm pretty convincingly. Perhaps they are good rat actors. But I don't think Clyde Beatty and Siegfried Sassoon together could train 100 rats to pretend to drown, then play dead while floating underwater, a trick employed here with great verisimilitude. <br /><br />There is lots of bad process photography, and the puppet rat heads are more impressive than the awful script and underutilized all-star cast. Bert Gordon never did less with so much. But the real rats are filmed in slow motion against miniatures in medium and long shots, and they die there, with more realism than is achieved by any other part of the picture. Wholesale slaughter of furred creatures seems unlikely so late as '76, but I doubt the FOTG set even saw a licensed caterer, much less OSHA or the Humane Society.