Featured Creature The Rat File 3: The one with Robocop vs a rat

 

 Title: Of Unknown Origin

What Year?: 1983

Classification: Irreproducible Oddity

Rating: Ow, My Brain!!! (Unrated/ NR)

 

With this review, I’m at the end of my planned run for this series. As it happens, it’s brought me back to the one that really started it all. It’s one I saw a long time ago, and assumed was too obscure to find again until it turned up in my rounds of the used shelves. It was this acquisition, even before my completely random review of The Witches, that convinced me to do this survey of the “rat movie” niche genre. It is easily the strangest of all the ones I encountered or considered, and the time it took to get here was still only a part of what I needed to make anything of it. I present Of Unknown Origin, and notwithstanding the title, trailers and packaging, it’s about the guy who played Robocop trying to kill a rat. Yes, one rat.

Our story begins with a businessman in a picturesque Victorian-looking house in the middle of the big city. While he’s handling a big account, his wife and son leave for reasons that won’t figure in the plot. Alone in the house, he tries his hand at renovating the place, when he begins to notice noises and disturbances. He soon realizes he has a rodent problem, and sets out to pit his human wits against the vermin. Of course, it soon becomes apparent that the vermin have the upper hand, if they truly exist. Soon, he is exasperating an exterminator and upsetting his coworkers as he goes after the rat like either Captain Ahab after Moby Dick or Tom after Jerry. As his work goes downhill and the house takes on collateral damage, he seals himself in for a final hunt for the rat. It’s primate against rodent, and whoever wins, the property values are definitely losing!

Of Unknown Origin was a 1983 horror film directed by George P. Cosmatos, based on the novel The Visitor by Chauncey G. Parker. The movie was produced by Warner Bros and the Canadian Film Development Corporation, with filming mainly in Montreal, Canada. The film starred Peter Weller as Bart Hughes, with Shannon Tweed as Mrs. Hughes and Louis Del Grande as the exterminator Clete. Creature/ special effects were credited to a team including Louis Craig and Stephan Depuis, both of whom also worked on the 1986 version of The Fly. The film was not a commercial success, earning an estimated $1.1 million box office against a $4M budget. Cosmatos directed Weller again with Leviathan in 1989. The film is currently available on disc and digital platforms.

For my experiences, this is one that I first saw toward the very end of 2008, while travelling on one of my attempts to promote my fiction writing. I ordered it as a Netflix “rental” without really knowing anything about it beyond Weller’s participation. I came through with a moderately positive impression of the film, as a psychological horror piece and maybe a sort of parody/ satire of movies like Willard and Food of the Gods. Since then, it was never quite a Wall Of Nothing (see Two Evil Eyes and The Wild), but spontaneous mentions of it were certainly few and far between. What I find striking in hindsight are indeed two key considerations in whether one can take this film seriously even at face value. If one can grant it ambiguous whether “the” rat actually exists, then the premise remains pretty solid. If one can further allow that this is on a certain level supposed to be funny, then it offers real potential. The one thing that is “off” is the borderline false advertising of the art and to a certain point the title itself, which all feel resolutely straight. (The one “title drop” really seems like a reference to the word “rat”.) Whatever those involved intended, this is indeed a central problem of the film, because this is one movie where a good laugh is a matter of survival.

Moving forward, the obvious better points of the movie are in Weller and the supporting cast. This apparently included some pretty big character-actor names as Bert’s colleagues, but I didn’t care enough to sort them out. The chemistry that makes the movie is between the star and Del Grande. In their key early interactions, the businessman and the exterminator seem about equally matched, and one can extrapolate where the professional’s obsessive but justifiable interest in his work forms the substrate of the madness that will follow. Once things get going, there’s plenty of further fun as Weller/ Hughes shares factoids about rats with his completely uninterested coworkers, which is about right for kid/ teenage me at family gatherings. None of it really changes the outcome, however, as even the rat catcher grows disgusted with Bert’s fixations and increasing scruffiness.  We finally get the allegory the story has been aiming for in the finale, especially when Bert chases the rat into a dollhouse, fulfilling the symbolic destruction of his dreams.

Then, of course, there’s the rat, and what stands out is that we really don’t need to see nearly as much of it as we do. In my further recollections, I went in without a clear recollection of the rat appearing except in a few shots. In fact, the rat does get a decent amount of screen time, which looks like about a 60-40 split between some kind of puppet and closeups of a live animal. Other sequences show the traces and depredations of the rodent, particularly the wanton destruction of our hero’s food stores. These scenes in particular set the right tone in terms of potential ambiguity; he clearly isn’t just imagining it, but is it really “the” rat, or just an indeterminate number of ordinary vermin doing what’s natural? As we do get better looks at the rat, it simply heightens the sense of unreality. The puppet is really surprisingly poor considering the resumes of those involved, which in itself kind of works in the Dark Star intentionally-kaka vein. (RIP the beachball alien…) What strains things is the sheer size of the damn thing. We already had the actually banned African super-rat that represented Ben in the Willard remake; this makes him look like a cute little chipmunk, and we don’t get a payoff to speak of.

That leaves the “one scene”, and I’m going with one that’s different even for this movie. After discovering a seemingly gratuitous raid on his pantry, Bert descends into the basement, carrying a tray that as far as I can make out holds traps and poisons. The shots are typical of the sequence and the movie as a whole, dark and vaguely moody yet a little too sharp and simple to be “atmospheric”. On reaching the cellar, he sets down the tray and inspects the dollhouse, an outwardly precise model of the house that serves very effectively. As he begins to investigate, we glimpse the rat peering out, portrayed with the live animal. Momentarily, Bert picks up the remnant of a box, and discovers a nest of hairless, blind baby rodents. It’s a surprisingly low-key moment, and it’s all the more striking that our protagonist makes no move to kill the kits, perhaps a sign that he has still not quite reached the level of savagery and derangement we will see later. It’s more than enough to provoke the rat, which attacks with a frequently used squeal that seems more like what would come from a hog. From there, the scene is predictable, yet what has come so far remains intriguing and unexpected.

In closing, the main thing to say about the rating is that I was ready to give this the lowest rating, which would ironically have been the first  movie in this feature to go that low since Leviathan. I decided that wasn’t what it deserved, but I couldn’t justify a much higher rating after going hard on Willard. That left the “’unrated” option as the only logical alternative, an option I hadn’t used for so long I would have been ready to admit it retired until now. That, on consideration, is very much what it deserves. It’s very strange, even harder to “read”, and ultimately not very good, yet the one thing it isn’t is forgettable. On the whole, I’m happy to have come back to it, and that’s plenty of praise from me.