October Edition #6: OF UNKNOWN ORIGIN

Director: George P. Cosmatos
Screenplay: Brian Taggert, based on “The Visitor” by Chauncey G. Parker III
Starring: Peter Weller, Jennifer Dale, Shannon Tweed
Release Date: 1983


Bart Hughes (Peter Weller) is a proud man who likes to be in control of all aspects of his life, to do things on his own. A banking executive at a trust company, he’s on the cusp of securing an important merger between two companies that could mean a major promotion, and he could really use the extra cash on account of his family moving into the New York brownstone apartment that he’s just renovated with his bare hands. With the wife (Tweed) and kid out of town visiting family, Bart has the house to himself as he prepares to buckle down and work on the merger. That is, until a gigantic rat shows up and proceeds to systematically tear his life, and his sanity, to shreds.

OF UNKNOWN ORIGIN is a tense, taut, methodically paced little thriller that gets under your skin from the get-go. As soon as Bart’s family leaves in the film’s opening moments, an immediate feeling of dread sets in, helped by director Cosmatos’ skillful use of shadows to convey the rats’ presence without ever actually showing the beast. Not a lot appears to happen in the first twenty minutes as Bart goes about his daily routine, but the not-so-little monster is constantly scurrying around in the background or on the edges of the frame, at one point even barely seen in the reflection of a toaster.

Toast-making action that leaps off the screen!

It is techniques like these that draw one into the film, as we’ve all had those moments in our own homes where we could almost swear we saw something moving in the corner of our vision. I also quite like the numerous shots from the rats’ point of view, particularly a nifty shot from amid the springs in the interior of a mattress that took me a few seconds to register what I was seeing. From beginning to end, we never see the rat in its entirety. Cosmatos instead gives us glimpses of filthy claws pressing against glass, the occasional shot of its’ massive tail darting behind objects, and the hateful glare of its’ beady eyes, which is great, because I honestly feel that showing us a giant animatronic rat would have been incredibly cheesy and totally ruined the creepiness inherent in never knowing exactly where the little bastard is.

As the film progresses the rat becomes more brazen in his exploits through Bart’s abode, flooding his kitchen by chewing through tubing and eating holes through his pantry. At first Bart tries using the usual mouse traps, but those just get torn to shreds, so he quickly switches to steel, bear trap-like monstrosities that look like they might have been designed by Jigsaw from SAW, and you just know one of those is going to be used on a human by film‘s end. When the rodent fails to set any of those off, he tries using poison, which just pisses the little bastard off in a great scene in which Bart gets up in the middle of the night to use the restroom and finds a shrieking ball of fur in the toilet leaping for his junk. He even adopts a cat, which the rat kills and somehow leaves on top of his refrigerator.

The longer this goes on, the more Bart’s mental state begins to decline. He can’t get to sleep for all the scratching in the walls, and he spends all of his days researching rats and ways of killing them. Needless to say it begins to affect the quality of his work, as his employers doubt whether he can take on the merger by himself in such an addled mental state. In one of the movie’s best scenes Bart attends a dinner party with several of his co-workers and goes off on a monologue akin to Quint’s from JAWS, detailing to his sickened hosts the horrifying statistics of rats, their diseases, and the cultures who worship them, even describing rats served for food in an Asian country as “stringy chicken”, which is of course accompanied by a loving close-up of the chicken the guests have been tearing into.

How most nights end at my house.

Clearly, Bart has become obsessed. This is, after all, his home. He was here first. And as the day of his family’s return gets closer, he is haunted by a series of darkly comic dreams in which the rat violently interrupts family activities, including a great jump scare involving a rat bursting out of a birthday cake to attack his son. Weller’s performance carries this whole flick, making  Bart a character we can totally sympathize with and, especially if you have a rat phobia, totally get behind in his war on giant mutant rodents. By the film’s climax I was cheering for the poor guy, who goes completely off the deep end, fashioning an insane bludgeoning device by hammering a bunch of nails, saw blades and steel mouse traps onto a baseball bat, and going on an epic rampage through his house, smashing into walls, pipes, and furniture, completely demolishing the home he is so hell-bent on saving.

The final ten minutes of this movie are crazy fun to watch, and I was almost willing to declare this movie a new classic, except they fucked up the ending. Now, let me be clear, the ending to the main story thread with the rat is epic and totally satisfying. It’s the actual ending, the last thirty seconds or so, that almost ruined it for me, as the final line is delivered so matter of fact and unconvincingly, I couldn’t help but roll my eyes. I was honestly hoping the movie would have a downer of an ending, and couldn’t see any way the flick could end without Bart losing a piece of his soul in the end. I don’t know, maybe I’m just being picky, but those last few seconds left a bad taste in my mouth, enough to lower the film’s rating a full number grade.

Getting rid of this vermin will be far from a piece of cake.

That one major stumble aside, this was a cool little movie that I would definitely recommend to anyone who digs these kinds of “Man Vs. Nature” movies. In its own way it’s kinda the  “Moby Dick” of the killer rat sub-genre, and thanks to a solid lead performance and some very stylish direction is incredibly effective at making the viewer question just how far they would go to protect their home from an unwelcome invader.


My Rating:
7.5/10