Cabinet of Curiosities: Episode 2 – Graveyard Rats

TLDR; Summary

Masson is a cemetery manager who steals shit from graves to pay off a personal debt. He stumbles upon a rat colony filled with treasure, and he fucks around and finds out.

The Whole Story with Spoilers

• Set in the 1800s, we meet Masson, the manager of this here cemetery. After busting some grave robbers, Masson saves the loot for himself. Turns out, he owes some shady people some money and is using his role to find sellable items. He still hasn’t paid his way out yet; he blames rats for the lack of lucrative belongings, rats who are working through a series of underground caverns and tunnels.
• Faced with a week left before his debt comes due, the manager calls in a favor from the local coroner, asking if anyone rich has died lately. The coroner has been hiding a recently dead body that wasn’t even embalmed yet. The family of the deceased man is clearly wealthy, talking about the possessions they want to bury with his body.
• The same night the rich man is buried, Masson is digging up his grave. But he can hear the rats in the coffin, and as he opens it up, Masson watches the body being dragged from the coffin into an underground tunnel. Masson crawls in after them hoping to recover the goods. Chaos ensues: some tunnels collapse, a bunch of rats chase him out of the tunnel, his toe gets bit. He shoots his gun and apparently hits the rat mother – a gigantic rat creature who then gets all up in his face. The commotion causes him to end up in the bone pit, a large cavern where the rats have been storing the dead bodies from the cemetery.
• Rats don’t give a shit about possessions, of course, so Masson is stuffing his pockets full of all the loot in the bone pit. There’s also a bunch of effigies down there, too. Masson can’t help himself, obvi, so he steals a shiny gold necklace from a mummy, who of course, comes alive as soon as he removes it. This upper torso of a mummy manages to bite Masson’s ear off, all the while screaming, “Mine!” JUST GIVE UP THE NECKLACE. But I guess the point is about greed, so…
• Masson bumbles his way out of the tunnel system as he’s being chased by this upper torso that happens to be faster than the mother rat. In a showdown, the rat pounces first but is killed when Masson pulls some kind of root that drops a slab of concrete on the rubbery mother rat.
• Masson follows the light…into a coffin. The final scene is the grave robbers from the first scene open up the coffin to find Masson full of rats.

Horror Hating

• This is probably my least favorite in this series. The storyline and special effects are meh.
• The rat is comically large and gross. These are not high-budget productions, is my guess, so there are a lot of rat closeups.
• So rats and mummies??? Those are two plotlines, friends. This is a short production, pick one.