And based on a Philip K. Dick short story. Which makes it far from the worst adaptation of one, tbh.
Of Unknown Origin - I have thoughts. Oh boy.
I am going to get spoilerific but I’ll put a header when that starts. Not going to blur it, this movie is 250 years old. Before I get to that, I’ll just make some general comments. This is directed by George P Cosmatos. This movie, uh, “launched” a “storied” career, to use words in a way that maybe I oughtn’t. He follows it up with Rambo: First Blood Part II, Cobra, Leviathan(!), and Tombstone.
Tombstone is terrific. I love Cobra, but it’s an idiotic cheese fest about a strange serial killer cult and Sly eats pizza after cutting it into weird pieces with a large pair of scissors, a baffling decision that feels like the single most Nic Cage thing Sly has ever done (and Sly - whose career is deeply interesting - has done some goofy and weird shit). “You’re the disease, and I’m the cure” is a saying a friend and I used to intone over and over to each other while playing Mario Kart and Street Fighter II on the SNES (we also used lots of lines from Rocky movies, “I must break you” foremost). Rambo II is a movie that launched a franchise proper (an action franchise that was not as good as/beneath the surprising first film). And Leviathan is gigantic jug of hot diarrhea that I paid money to see in a theater at an age when one tended to do that in groups with horror movies (basically the onset of highschool). It’s certainly something, as careers go.
Headlined by Peter Weller before he had been in anything you had ever heard of (including another 80s favorite of mine: Firstborn!), a year out from Buckaroo Banzai (an improbable movie that is both very 80s cheesy and which Weller still comes off as super fucking cool in). This one features small parts from Maury Chaykin (who doesn’t have much to do) and character actor Kenneth Welsh. It also features Shannon Tweed as the wife (looking fabulous). A fellow by the name of Louis Del Grande in a good turn as the super of the building (Clete) next door who helps Weller as much as humanly possible. You might remember him as the dude whose head Darrel Revok explodes on the stage in Scanners (I’m not sure I can place him in anything else).
It features not one but two fakeout dream sequences except I’m not sure if one is a dream or Weller sort of being lost in a booze-enhanced trance and just imagining horrible things. It features - I am not shitting you - a training montage (albeit a brief one). It features an arguable Rule of Cool power up sequence that is horribly broken up by some weird editing/pacing decisions and some even dumber/weird character decisions (but I do love this sequence). It features zero human deaths although one cat death. It features Rat POV shots that add nothing. It features occasional footage of the rat running through/under tunnels/floorboards/sewer pipes/etc; third person as it were. It features the rat watching weller in both 1st and 3rd person. It is allegorical insofar as paralleling Weller’s obsession with finishing a very difficult work project (promotion on the line) with his obsession of fucking killing this goddamn rat * queue Weller screaming*. It’s also as allegorical insofar as an increasingly obsessed Weller is screaming at the rat for making noises in the walls/ceiling and then beating on the ceiling with the book he is reading. That book is Moby Dick. So, uh, not that allegorical, if you are keeping score at home. It offers no explanation for why the Rat has decided to destroy Peter Weller whatsoever, which works.
It features a singularly hilarious scene involving Clete and Weller that I had entirely forgotten existed and which I can’t say enough good things about.
It doesn’t entirely work but it’s not a failure either. Weller’s obsession slowly mounts, and mostly covers why he doesn’t just leave the fucking house. He is, at times, clever about how he goes about dealing with the pest but then at other times he is dumb as shit. Even accepting the premise that he’s not going to fucking leave the home and it is what it is, he does horribly dumb shit at times. His descent into insanity is mostly well done but has a couple of weird out of place spikes. I still kind of like this movie although it is sort of dumb and is less than the premise.
Actual Spoilers to follow.
Packing his wife and kid off for a nice vacation (Catskills resort perhaps?) at the start of the movie, Weller then heads to work to get the good/bad news. He’s primed for a senior VP position (“and then a spot on the board”) working for some sort of investment banking/venture capital/whatever firm. But one of his best (and favorite) accounts is passed off so he can take over a Bank thingy. He knows that it’s a tryout. Everyone at work knows it’s a tryout. You can’t get him down though. It’s in the bag.
He arrives home to find that his kitchen is covered in water and the dish washer is sort of vomiting water aggressively. He brings Clete over because the regular plumber is out of town. “Should have called me anyway”. Clete is (1) a good guy (2) a useful font of information (3) earnest in his desire to help Weller conquer the impending rat problem (4) terribly underrated.
We watch Weller leave through the blinds in our first inexplicable POV sequence. These detract from the movie and were not a good idea IMO. One thing that Cosmatos does is that he basically established the Rat as more or less alien, clever, but somewhat understandable insofar as it has some very basic instincts we can map to. This is a turf war, basically (Weller doesn’t know this yet), even if we don’t understand why it’s happening (nor do we need to).
In fixing the mess he finds a hose that’s been mauled (the actual Sink is the issue). This segment finishes establishing that this brownstone is a fixer upper and Weller did a lot of it himself. This is am important plot point but not in the way you might think. Clete runs through possible explanations. Heat from the Dishwasher running, wear and tear,l mice. “No mice here man”, says Weller (who is game in this, it must be noted). “Well it would take a lot of mice to chew through that” (or soemsuch), intones Clete. “A Rat could do it”. And we quickly get to the idea that it’s a Rat. Clete is 100% certain by the end of the conversation. Weller finds some destroyed shit the next morning and puts down some regular nice traps. He’ll return at lunch to find one of them completely mauled so he can visit Clete and get some more exposition. Clete giggles at the traps and chides repeatedly over them. “Look man, there’s 5 things you can do with a rat. Trap em, poison em, gas em, bop them on the head, or shoot them”. By traps he means real fucking traps. Weller obliges.
There’s two separate trap laying sequences in the movie, and it’s sort of odd. How the hell did Weller arrive at these being the proper places for traps? It’s odd because his next move will be to visit the library over lunch (possibly more than one lunch) and do a shitload of research. It just seems weird that we wouldn’t see Weller moving traps after finding out that arbitrarily picking places for them isn’t useful.
But it;s here things start to go awry. Weller is good here. He starts becoming increasingly distracted at work and he sells it. When he’s placing the second set of traps he has a nice chat with his Son’s stuffed animals about the whole affair. But I don’t think Cosmatos gets the pacing or sequence of events quite right. Weller returns late from a library lunch on the day of his big dinner meeting with, uh, a bank person and several work people. Then at the dinner, he gives us an increasingly “what the fuck have you gotten into this evening” five minute rant about rats to the dinner goers who are clearly taken aback. But this sequence is cut away from too abruptly (the wife of someone at the dinner makes a comment I can’t recall now about no account for taste or somesuch) and that’s it. Nobody at work is concerned about a very bizarre sequence. Later we’ll get scenes with and without Weller where people wonder if he’s up to the task, why he’s so distracted, can he handle the pressure, is he losing it. But none of that until several more days and nights of early “Weller coming unhinged” and the Rat just wrecking Weller’s existence.
Which the Rat does. It starts out making it’s presence known obnoxiously. It surprises him in the toilet (Clete giggles about this later “Rats like to target the soft bits”). It will pull off covers in the night because fuck off. It eats the mail. It starts destroying shit in very methodical fashion. It will trash the food. It chews through a bunch of wires and cables and shit. It cuts off a phone call at one point. One night it trashes every sheet/towel/etc in the house. Towards the end of the movie Weller is sleeping in a goddamn hammock laid out above his bed because the Rat will get him while he’s asleep otherwise. And he’s obviously not leaving.
There’s enough here for an effective movie. The cut between work (unravelling) and the nightly sieges mostly works (the dinner sequence simply needed to come later in the movie, where it would fit perfectly). At one point the assistant comes over and she’s got to retrieve some papers/etc and she and Weller nearly share a kiss (Rattus interuptus - it’s in the walls here). The marriage isn’t portrayed as off. But it’s clear the assistant maybe does have feelings for him, is very concerned (he’s started to act a bit off and the pressure is mounting). These are the sorts of things that make characters in movies feel like they live in a world, not a movie. So to with Clete, and the work banter scenes.
The movie is undone by a couple of things. The dinner sequence isn’t the only thing out of order/out of place or just “I don’t even”. At one point there’s a . . . I don’t even know how to describe it. Weller is working on those documents man, drinking some J&B (complete with “I saw Empire of the Ants too dude” reverse shots of the rat through the bottom of the fancy rocks glass). He’s drifting off? Or not? And then we get a fake out dream sequence or a weird imagined sequence that sequence back into panning through the house and then Weller is. . . sitting in his kid’s bed crying and staring at shit (the dream sequence features the rat popping out of a cake at his kid’s birthday party) and then we’re panning through the house again and Weller is somewhere else and what did I just watch?
Nome of the Rat POV shots feel useful. There are some solid shots of the Rat - rather, just glimpses of it, often the tail and maybe part of the back end - as it’s going about it’s business in the actual apartment (the eaten mail is hinted at when we see it from the bottom of the glass table in the living room).
The action sequences before the finale just don’t really work. At one point the rat pulls off the covers, yanks the phone of the hook to wake Weller, and then attacks him as he wakes up disoriented. It sort of jumps at him, by which I mean a stuffed model or whatever is thrown off to the side and Weller sort of side dodges it even though it’s not going to hit him. Then there’s the time our bold foe charges Weller and five holes him. It’s a POV shot (uh), and Weller is so stunned he starts falling as he turns to track the rat so he throws a book at it while he’s falling. He misses, as one does when trying to grab and throw a book at a fleeing rat, while falling down.
One time he manages to hit it with a bat. Maybe? He’s pretty sure he hit it, in the same way that a child is certain he landed a tag on the playground and is informing us of the fact (yes, he’s saying it out loud)/ “I hit you. I know I hit you. I’m certain I hit you. Yep, I hit you”. That part doesn’t sell the crazy quite so well. It’s just goofy but not funny.
Weller tries traps, proper traps, poison but none of it works. He doesn’t gas - that would concede the home and that’s a hill he’s going to die on, one assumes. He never tries to shoot it, oddly enough. But this brings us to more jumbled sequence.
There’s a secondary character to Clete, a hardware salesman. Weller stops by several times, get’s the lowdown on various rat poisons, and purchases a number of things. One of those is flashlights. We get a scene of him taping two together. . . why? This makes no sense? But this is the beginning of the power up sequence, which is chopped up all weirdly and won’t resume for some time yet.
After this and some other scenes in and out of the house Weller will spend some time rummaging through shit in the house trying to find stuff. He comes up with Cleats. Shinguards. An aluminum bat (one nice thing about this: the son is too young for this and the stuff is Weller sized; so we know the otherwise fit Weller has or had a softball hobby. This also sells that the house is still somewhat close to “finished enough to move in”. But they’re not entirely unpacked). A hard hat? I’m pretty sure he tapes a flashlight to the hard hat later and it’s not a mining hat but I can’t tell and we don’t see him tape the flashlight to the mining hat. But this isn’t done all at once. The “I hit you scene” falls in here somewhere.
So too does the injury. Something like 45 minutes into the movie we finally visit the basement. There’s a model of the house in the basement. Why? Not sure. My memory failed me here, I thought he had a daughter and it was a doll house. But Weller talks a lot in the movie about the home having been a fixer upper, how much work he did himself, so maybe that’s why it’s there? He puts a trap in it. Why? I really honestly don’t know. But this is important.
After gathering up his tools and implements, Weller forgets about them (except the bat) for awhile. He tries to call an exterminator (actually, he talks about this a decent amount, he’s having trouble finding one who can service him on short notice) and finally gets one. He leaves a check for the guy and heads off to work and returns home only to see the piano keys moving by themselves. OR ARE THEY? No it’s the rat. Except it’s not it turns out - it’s a destroyed trap (?!?) but this is how Weller knows the Rat is still alive and he calls the exterminator FURIOUS. He starts out ranting about how it’s still alive but the exterminator cuts him off. “You didn’t leave the money like you said you would pal”. Weller stairs down at the glass coffee table where the check for the exterminator is shredded (but intact enough to know it’s a check). You know, the same table where the rat at the mail. And this is after the rat has chewed through linens, food, a bunch of other shit, cables, and caused major havoc. Weller doesn’t have it all together at this point but this is kind of dumb.
Weller them remembers he was going to power up and fucking kill this rat, but then things go off the rails again. He starts collecting the rat traps and breaking them down. He decides to go get the trap in the model house, but it’s not right in the doorway of the thing where he left it. So he starts pawing around inside and wouldn’t you know it, he gets chomped. This is a pretty serious injury, so he does what any normal human being would do at this point.
He cleans it and bandages it on his own, and then goes and soaks in the bathtub and gets drunk and passes out. In fairness, he makes no small attempt to barricade himself in. There’s like 5 separate stacks of 4-5+ doorstopper sized books piled in front of the the door. There’s stacks on top of the toilet seat and tank. The thing gets through the ceiling although doesn’t get him. In between all of this I think he has the next dream sequence, which is the family returning, some sexy time with Tweed while his kids makes. . . I don’t really know what the kid makes. He pours milk in a bowl. He pours a lot of sugar in. He pours in powdered sugar? Not sure. And then he pours in some other substance. And starts stirring. The rat pounces on Tweed’s back while she and Weller are getting it on and that’s when he wakes up in the tub IIRC (and then discovers the bathroom fortress isn’t as secure as he thought).
There’s two absolutely choice sequences before/while Weller remembers his gear and gets back to powering up. The first his he goes into work looking like dogshit. He’s not even wearing a suit, and it’s a stark contrast to his meticulous appearance earlier in the film (although one that does start to hint at his mental state here and there). He see’s his boss in the lobby and there’s a good come to Jesus sequence. The boss is like “Jesus Peter [whatever his character’s name is], don’t let the other workers see you like this” (the phrasing is slightly odd. Weller responds with something like “look, I’m dealing with some stuff outside of work. It’s all about priorities. You’ll have the report and you’ll have it on time. But not before I handle this other stuff. You wanna give this to [some flunkie], fine. It’s your call. You want to stick with me, that’s fine too. I’ll get this done.” And the boss repeats his previous line. This is a good scene that properly shows off how dire things are getting for Weller, who is now treating work as a thing on the side and is in no way shape or form hiding the fact that Work is the side gig (where as he tried to keep it the main thing for a long time.
Those rat traps are important though. Weller finally sits down with some fucking tools and goes to work on the bat. He drills very long nails through the bat at various angles. He attaches several of the upper/lower hinged spike jaws to the bat somehow. He makes this, and it ties into the second sequence.
A homemade morning star because it’s time to get hands on. I fucking loved this thing as a kid and I still love it. It makes zero fucking sense. Who cares. It’s awesome. Weller is so determined to kill this rat I’m shocked he’s not trying to make his own chainmail. If only there were time. Somewhere during this, we get to the second sequence.
His assistant shows up and starts calling out to him from outside. Almost breathlessly “we’ve gotten a two week extension!” . Clete watches from next door, concerned. Weller calls out from inside the house “LEAVE US ALONE”. Oh, sorry, right. She leaves disappointed. But Clete is concerned. So he marches right the fuck in and down some stairs to where Peter is (but this isn’t the basement where the model house is).
He looks at Weller. Weller regards him while holding his new toy. Clete looks at the +5 Holy Basher Master of Fuck You. He looks over the tool table. He looks back at Weller for a moment. He then shakes his head and say “no” (or possibly nope) and just walks right the fuck back up the stairs, out of the house, and out of the movie. I was in stitches. This guy had some acting chops. I feel like he should have been in 4 Cronenberg movies and a couple of Carpenter movies and he would be one of those hall of fame 70s/80s that guys. But it wasn’t meant to be.
Weller dons the cleats, the shin guards, the be-lighted hard hat, brandishes the Basher Masher, and then proceeds to hunt down the rat and kill it. The battle will rage across several rooms, and levels, of the house. Weller will destory every intact thing he can come across, with on exception. Eventually this includes the rat, who does not horror movie us at the end in any way. The sequence works I think. It will finish in the basement, and then Weller will return upstairs and realize there’s still a vase/flower pot thingy standing. He casually, deliberately, shoves it off the mantle or shelf or whatever so it breaks, regards his handy work, and seems pleased.
The family arrives home, and from outside of the house and we hear he and Tweed conduct an exchange over the closing credits.
“Honey are you ok? What happened?” (or somesuch). “I had a party”.
Fin.
Like Ahab, Weller is fucking obsessed. Unlike Ahab, Weller isn’t in smack dab int he middle of an old feud he intends to see to it’s conclusion, come hell or high water. Instead, he’s dropped into one and his obsessive nature can’t let him back down or walk away. This at times works, and at times strains credibility. Being heavy handed on the Moby Dick front isn’t helpful (Weller reading it scene, also there’s footage of some movie I’m not sure about on a TV at one point. Is it an early Moby Dick? Don’t know it’s brief). The parallel to the rat race isn’t subtle but doesn’t need to be and shouldn’t be.
I am spent.
But fuck. Now I need to watch Scanners 1-3. I want to watch the third because I haven’t seen it in ages and while it isn’t good I kind of lived it. But I need to watch the second because I can’t remember anything about it whatsoever and so I can’t not watch it. Was it secretly Scanner Cop or something (IMDB says no, there’s a straight up Scanners 2)? And I need to watch the first because in for a penny, I might as well watch the actual good one.
But first, Mulberry St. And lunch. Maybe I should slip Deadly Eyes in here somewhere.
Epic write-up, @peacedog! Thanks so much for re-living this for us. Please watch and get similarly inspired by more bad horror movies.
So that’s where poltergeists learned that trick!
-Tom
Damn, I don’t even feel like I need to see this movie now.
Hey, hey, hey, don’t be mean. We don’t have to be mean because, remember, no matter where you go, there you are…
:D
I love the movie but I won’t deny the rough edges.
Oh, the deuce you say.
Turns out there’s no gif of that AND no clip I can make a gif of. I’d have to pull out my DVD and rip it…
Mullberry Street - As I did not attend the Bobby Morton School of Filming Shit, there’s a great deal of cinema that remains unfathomable to me. There’s something about how this was filmed, I think, that’s a bit peculiar but I liked it. It wasn’t so much that it was grainy, and I don’t have the knowledge/language to try and explain it. Someone else will have too. But I think it worked as part of what was obviously a very low budget effort. Although that budget is very well used.
This movie does a lot right and is a good Zombie variant (even if it’s basically just zombies). The escalation of the situation New York is facing sort of happening in the background and then basically popping into the fore as characters notice it was very well done from a story telling standpoint. The acting is solid, nothing spectacular but way above what you’d get in a SyFy exclusive. The Directing helps there a lot I assume. A couple of the action scenes were a bit too frantic for my tastes (I like being able to follow the action better, but I understand the artistic choice especially on a low budget), but overall this stuff works well too. There’s really only one “stupid” scene:
When the razombie woman appears “behind” the dude in the wheel chair in his apartment.
I didn’t quite grasp something at the end:
Why was the ex solider lady just tranquilized and left? Because she was so covered in gore nobody was sure if she was infected or not?
Otherwise this is a very well done fall story, IMO (even if it’s only the fall of New York). I am partial to those, although I tend to enjoy them more in other media since I like to spend some time in it and there’s limits to what you can do in a single movie. Thanks @tomchick for the recommendation.
Green Room - a rewatch for a bit of a palate cleanse before I track down Scanners II and III and then go digging back in the 70s and 80s to see what I can find. What a great movie.
Man, it has been a week.
Scanners - a cult classic that’s got no small amount of cheesiness. Also, there’s no small amount of convenience in this movie. E.g. at one point our protagonists are out cruising and a van of hit men just happen to pull up a long side type stuff. Stephen Lack is not the best actor. But he and Cronenberg do get some mileage out of those steely eyes. The movie is weird, but it works in a very Cronenbergian way.
But I still can’t get over how weird the scene is where the immortal Patrick McGoohan’s Dr Ruth, after failing to convince Cameron to go scan the Consec computer before finding Kim Oberist, begins this sort of disjointed internal monologue while wandering aimlessly, before he gets murdered.
Anyway, there was, on the internets, prepping to begin Scanners II. I was reading up on it at IMDB because I still couldn’t really remember anything about it. So I click over on the lead actress’s page - she is playing the daughter of Cameron and Kim in the first movie - and look over her list and she was in a movie in 1983 called Dance of the Dwarfs, with Peter Fonda. Don’t know what possessed me to take a look at that, but this was a borderline revelatory experience.
I am 99% sure I have seen a scene from this movie - possibly an early/opening scene - and that it is in fact a “lost horror” movie I’ve been wondering about for well over 3 decades that at one point I thought maybe I had hallucinated/dreamt of that wasn’t real. So far I cannot find a place online to watch it (or even buy a physical copy).
But I will not give up hope, no sir or madam.
I don’t have anything to add of substance to this thread, but I’d just like to voice my appreciation for those of you who really scour film releases old and new to find hidden gems. My wife insists that we watch at least one horror movie a day every day of October as part of a month long celebration of Halloween, and she’s always thrilled when I get a recommendation from this thread.
Just watch Phantasm 31 times.
It’s on YouTube. Search “dance of the dwarfs 1983 remastered” and it pops up.
John Amos is in it!
And it’s not good.
Even if you fail me for the rest of your existence your success means that the names of you and your family will be entered on the roles of those to be protected.
That channel has a few great lost movies.
Bloody New Year is bonkers bad.
I went to an indie horror film fest at a drive-in in New Hamphire last night. Happenstance Horror Fest
There were a few good ones in there. My friend had a movie in the festival, so she was the one who told me about it. There was this one lady, Krsy Fox, who had like 4 films in there and the last one was really entertaining. It was called What the Spell. It’s about some girls who get drunk and murder a cheating boyfriend with witchcraft.
No idea how you can watch this short of going to one of these film festivals. It was a lot of fun, check one out if you can.
I’ve seen everything Phantasm related, those are high on my wife’s list. She likes the cheese.
I watched Phantasm 2 last weekend while I was high and it was still disappointing.
Leave poor James Le Gros alone.
I’ve been on a “grimy NYC exploitation” kick recently with:
- Basket Case
- Brain Damage
- Maniac
- Maniac Cop
- Maniac Cop 2
All were solid (well, Maniac Cop was slightly disappointing), but I was especially impressed by Basket Case and Maniac in particular.
Add CHUD to that if you can find it!