In the last millennium, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth and VHS was the (only) way to watch your movies at home, I spent a lot of my summer holidays helping out at the TV repair and video rental shop of one of my cousins, where I was both fascinated and terrified by some of the videos he had available to rent there (I was in single digits during my 'terrified' phase). Some of the titles that caught my attention the most included Matango, Fungus of Terror, The Last Horror Film, Spasms and Of Unknown Origin, purely because of the video sleeves. Well, recently I managed to get hold of one of those films, and so now it's time to see if it was worth walking past the display with my eyes closed for months on end by watching Of Unknown Origin.
Bart Hughes is a happily married man living in New York. He has a beautiful wife, a young son, and he is successful enough in his job as a banker that he is a near shoe-in for a promotion if he is able to show his bosses what he can do. When his wife and son go away on vacation in Vermont with his wife's family, Bart stays behind in their brownstone - that he has only recently finished renovating himself - to work on the project that will assure his promotion. His work is interrupted, however, by a large rat that has decided to make his walls and air ducts its home, and starts chewing through wiring, tubing, walls, metal, and anything else it takes a fancy to. At first, Bart just lays out traps for the rat, but when the rat proves to be smarter and more vicious than that he is forced to ramp up his efforts to catch it. His obsession with killing the rat grows and grows, interfering with the rest of his life, until it becomes an all-out battle between man and rat...
Well then. I can safely say that Of Unknown Origin is nothing like how my eight-year-old self imagined it to be. I mean, look at that poster! That image implies something very different than what the film actually turned out to be - ie. a rat about the size of a chihuahua making its home in a man's house and then getting a serious nark on when the Man objects to this. Even the title implies something more than the reality, like an alien rat or possibly a precursor to those mutant ratmen from Mulberry Street, when it actually refers to a subtitle in a book Bart reads about rats, where rats are said to be "of unknown origin". Quite frankly, I feel that after 30 years of wondering anticipation, I've been more than a little let down.
Actually, that's not entirely fair on Of Unknown Origin, because once you get past its misleading poster/video cover (and the trailer, which paints the rat as supernatural in origin), it's quite an interesting little thriller. It's clearly got themes of obsession running throughout, although the movie does beat you about the head with it a little too much by having Bart reading Moby Dick at one point and watching The Old Man And The Sea at another. We watch as Bart's obsession with the rat leads him to neglect other aspects of his life, most critically his job, and he becomes more and more psychotic in his determination to kill the rat, which by the end has probably ceased to be a rat and is now the earthly manifestation of all of his worries, fears and obstacles in his life, as he swings around a baseball bat with nails hammered through it, utterly destroying his renovated brownstone - the material proof of his success and upward mobility.
It's Robocop Vs Giant Rat, except not literally because if it was Robocop the battle would have been over significantly quicker (although probably with the same amount of property damage). Of Unknown Origin was Peter Weller's first lead starring role in a film after about ten years of stage and TV roles, and he received the Best Actor award at the Paris Film Festival for his performance as Bart Hughes, and I have to say it's not undeserved. He doesn't become as scenery-chewingly psychotic as, say, Michael Keaton or Jack Nicholson or even Michael Ironside might have become in the same role; his obsessional madness is a more quiet and determined, but no less unnerving, type. Another way to gauge his madness might be to look at the traps he uses to try to kill the rat; he starts off with regular wooden ones (that the rat just chews through), then moves on to metal-jawed things that probably have a name like Rat Mutilator 3000, and by the end of the film it's a baseball bat with nails in.
We don't really get many full-on glimpses of the invading rat throughout the film; mostly we see its teeth, eyes, or tail as it scurries, chews and stalks its way around the house. Mainly our experience with the rat is seeing the damage it does, including the sad aftermath of rat Vs cat at one point, to hammer home the point that this is no ordinary rat (we don't see the cat actually being killed by the rat, just its corpse, and while this is a little upsetting it's also rather predictable narratively and also not in violation of the Carnography Rule of Animal Deaths in Film because it serves an actual purpose beyond just being a cheap way to shock and/or upset the audience, but be warned regardless). Since the rat is meant to be at least partly allegorical though, not getting a full look at it makes sense (and also I suspect a clear view would have revealed its almost certainly-animatronic nature and spoiled the effect). So in the end, while Of Unknown Origin might have turned out to be nothing like I imagined it to be, it's still an interesting film, and possibly easier for many of its audience to identify with, with its themes of obsession and control over one's life and home.
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