The Pied Piper of Basin Street

. . . is the part when the title character, having been trumped and swindled out of his contractual fee, retaliates by piping all but one of the town's children into the Rat Cave to which he'd conducted thousands of voracious rodents the previous week. Though a lagging kid on crutches survives to tell the preamble of what happened to all of his faster walking peers, the ravenous rats make short work of the sun-blinded youths who are able to flail around and scream in the total darkness for a relatively brief matter of hours until the last one is consumed. Unfortunately, as the heading THE PIED PIPER OF BASIN STREET implies, this tamer version packs little of a wallop, pulling the original's punches, with the short-changed piper-turned-trombone-tooter simply trucking the rats back to town and throwing a concert for the local teenagers. Universal may fancy itself America's FRANKENSTEIN MUMMY DRACULA House of Horror, but it's a horrible shame how they've corrupted the King of the Rats in this flick.