A Rat For Turkey Day

In most North American households today, the meat of choice will be turkey. But can I suggest making room for some prime rat on this day of thanks? Specifically, I'm thinking of the rampaging rodent that wreaks havoc in 1983's Of Unknown Origin.

Of Unknown Origin stars a pre-Buckaroo Banzai, pre-Robocop Peter Weller as Bart Hughes, a young and ambitious Wall Street banker living large in a Manhattan brownstone (although the movie was actually filmed in Montreal, Quebec) with his trophy wife Meg (Shannon Tweed, now Mrs. Gene Simmons) and young son Peter (Leif Anderson). As proficient as Bart is at navigating the professional rat race, he finds himself tested with the real deal when Meg and Peter travel to Vermont to visit family, leaving a work-strapped Bart home alone with an unexpected and unwanted visitor.

As Bart struggles to deliver on an important work assignment that could vault his career to the next level, he discovers that his upscale home is infested with a rat. And not just any rat but a Total Asshole Rat that fucks with Bart at every turn. Bart's guest initially just seems like a major nuisance, first announcing its presence by chewing through the drain hose in the dishwasher, causing a flood in the kitchen. But soon it's clear that this rat has a real hate-on for Bart. Unwilling to call in an exterminator - a move that will surely result in his home (which Bart renovated from the ground up) being trashed - Bart takes matters into his own hands.

Naturally, this rat proves difficult to kill. And as one attempt after another fails to produce a dead rat, the rat's counterattacks against Bart escalate in return. Immersing himself in all things Rat, Bart soon becomes the kind of person who can't even attend a posh dinner party without turning the conversation into a long lecture on Rattus norvegicus.

At one point late in the film, a copy of Herman Melville's Moby Dick makes an appearance - an unsubtle nod to Bart's growing Ahab-like obsession. By the climax, full-on war between man and rodent has been declared but in the end, only one can be the big cheese.

Directed by George P. Cosmatos (Cobra), Of Unknown Origin was adapted by Brian Taggert from the book The Visitor by Chauncey G. Parker III. Even though the film is largely a one-man show with most scenes involving Weller alone in his home, when Bart does venture out to go to work or to solicit professional advice on rat disposal, plenty of familiar faces are on hand. Besides Tweed, there's Lawrence Dane (Scannners), Kenneth Walsh (Twin Peaks), Keith Knight (My Bloody Valentine), and Maury Chaykin (War Games).

For reasons unexplained, 1983 proved to be something of a banner year for rat fans as just over a month before Origin's November 24th release date, on September 9th, the anthology film Nightmares - featuring the story "Night of the Rat" - was released. But whereas the Nightmares segment had featured a family terrorized by a giant rat of mystical origin, Bart's foe was just a normal, if hefty, rat but tenacious enough to drive a successful, educated professional into a savage showdown, street rules only.

Of Unknown Origin isn't a lost classic by any means but it's a taut effort that had a decent rep back in the day but seems to have fallen into obscurity in the years since. In light of current real world events, it's interesting to see a Wall Street executive portrayed as a sympathetic protagonist - as practically an Everyman, even. Today, the rat Bart faces would likely be perceived as a symbolic stand-in for the economically oppressed masses but in '83, it was no more than determined vermin with Bart locked in a turf war, protecting his home. Sure, his turf was a little nicer than our turf but that was nothing to begrudge him. Not back when things seemed to be a little more even-handed in the world.

Still, rich or poor, everybody should be thankful for what they've got.

Leviathan

Cynics often claim that people can be sold on anything but the truth is, you can't force a trend on the American public - not even when it's for their own damn good. In 1989, despite the best efforts of directors Sean Cunningham (Deep Star Six), James Cameron (The Abyss), and George Cosmatos (Leviathan), the much-ballyhooed age of the underwater alien film never quite came to pass, causing many dreams to die with it. Even Stephen Sommers (The Mummy, Van Helsing) tried his luck on this front years later in 1998 with Deep Rising but he fared no better. American movie-goers have collectively decided that, except for the original Cocoon (1985), aliens and water don't mix. And as with most stubbornly-held positions, logic doesn't seem to apply. Of all the things to reject, why this, after saying yes to so much else?

This is a question that may never be answered to anyone's satisfaction. Of course, some might suggest that the movies in question just weren't that good. Admittedly, there's some truth to that but honestly, was there any movies that were so much better to see in 1989 than Leviathan? Not so much, no. And keep in mind that Leviathan was out months before Tim Burton's Batman so there was plenty of space between these two potential blockbusters. And yet Leviathan's opening weekend competition was Fletch Lives and it still came in second - what the hell is wrong with people?

Sure, Leviathan may just be Alien set under the ocean rather than in space but as Alien was just a big budget gloss on 1958's It! The Terror From Beyond Space, let's not be too hard on Leviathan. What's really worthwhile about Leviathan isn't its storyline but its cast. It's not everyday that you get to see an ensemble like this save themselves from a mutant fish. You've got Peter Weller, Ernie Hudson, Daniel Stern, Hector Elizondo, Amanda Pays, and Richard Crenna as the crew of the underwater mining operation - plus there's Meg Foster as an ice-cold corporate bitch comfortably ensconced out of harm's way above the surface of the ocean. In the annals of aquatic agony, that's a rocking cast. Hard to believe audiences turned their noses up at a line-up like that, but then again it's hard to figure out what people want sometimes.

Telling the tale of a mining crew stationed on the ocean floor who encounter more than they bargained for when they recover items from a wrecked Russian ship named Leviathan, this is standard monster movie boilerplate. One of the items found on the sunken ship is a innocuous-seeming flask of Vodka that is later discovered to have been spiked with metagens used by the Russian government to experiment on the Leviathan's crew. When Daniel Stern's slovenly character of Six Pack carelessly ingests the Vodka and shares it with another crew member (Lisa Eilbacher, as 'Bowman'), they invite the same catastrophe that doomed the Leviathan as both are genetically altered and mutually absorbed into the shared body of a giant fish creature. Worse yet is the fact that this creature possesses all the memories and intelligence of the people it assimilates. Once this monstrosity is up and running and everyone knows what kind of shit they're in, it then falls on Weller as Beck - the reluctant head of operations, derisively called "Becky" by Six Pack - to get his remaining crew back to the surface.

Director George Cosmatos - responsible for the '80s favorites Of Unknown Origin, Rambo: First Blood Part II, and Cobra - doesn't quite do a stellar job here but he keeps it together. Contributions from other quarters of the productions, in fact, are a little less than what you'd expect from the people involved. Screenwriters David Peoples (Blade Runner, Unforgiven) and Jeb Stuart (Die Hard, The Fugitive) were capable of better and Stan Winston's effects are atypically unimpressive here with the film's creature lacking the kind of visual impact that Winston brought to his work on The Terminator, Aliens, and Predator. But production designer Ron Cobb (Conan The Barbarian) and composer Jerry Goldsmith (The Omen, Poltergeist), along with the film's cast, are much more on their game.

Even though it occasionally flounders, Leviathan remains my underwater alien film of choice. I watched it twice on the big screen in 1989 from high in the balcony of the Mohawk Theater, a local landmark of my college town of North Adams, MA - a single-screen movie house with art deco design that originally opened in 1938 and closed in 1991 with a planned restoration still pending. Due to money issues, the Mohawk only operated sporadically and Leviathan was one of the few movies I was able to see there during my time in North Adams. In its run-down condition, the Mohawk was a sunken ship of its own, a ruined relic in need of salvaging. Whenever I watch Leviathan today, memories of seeing it unfold on that giant screen wash over me and I can't help but think of all the water that's passed too quickly under the bridge since then.