Rats

Despite employing the tropes of the horror genre, maverick documentarist Morgan Spurlock develops a grudging respect for the fiendish villains of this squirm-inducing socio-nature study, which concludes in a Rajasthani temple housing the 35,000 rats that Hindus believe are reincarnated souls. Few will sympathise, however, with the scurrying pests pursued by a Mumbai slum clearance team or veteran exterminator Ed Sheehan and rodentologist Bobby Corrigan on tours of New York's vermin-infested hot spots. Nausea levels are also likely to rise during visits to a Vietnamese rat restaurant and the Cheltenham farm where some Sealyham terriers go about their flushing out duties with savage glee. But the real fascination lies in the scientific information graphically disseminated at laboratories in New Orleans, Westchester and Reading about the diseases and parasites that rats can pass on to humans, their growing resistance to poisons and the evolutionary intelligence that is rapidly turning the tide in the battle to control them.