Weirdhouse Cinema: Of Unknown Origin

In this episode of Weirdhouse Cinema, Rob and Joe discuss the 1983 Canadian rat thriller “Of Unknown Origin,” directed by George P. Cosmatos and starring Peter Weller.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:13):
Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema. This is Rob Lamb.

Speaker 3 (00:16):
And this is Joe McCormick. And today we're going to
be talking about the 1983 horror movie Of Unknown Origins,
starring Peter Weller of Robocop fame, the guy who played Robocop.
directed by George P. Cosmatos, who you know from probably
a lot of other more famous films in the 80s,
notably Rocky, or not Rocky, Rambo 2, the First Blood

(00:39):
Part 2, colon Rambo.

Speaker 2 (00:41):
Yeah, the second First Blood film, but also sort of
the first Rambo film proper.

Speaker 3 (00:47):
Because the first movie has the character of Rambo in it,
but he's not really the Rambo he becomes.

Speaker 2 (00:53):
Yeah, that's probably one of his biggest hits along with Tombstone. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (00:58):
Uh, so of unknown origin is a movie I have
wanted to cover on the show for quite a while,
mainly because of it's, um, it's got a crazy elevator pitch,
which is that Peter Weller plays a yuppie business executive
in 1980s Manhattan who spends the entire movie trying to

(01:20):
kill a rat in his house. And I always thought
I hadn't seen it. I knew what I knew that pitch.
And I was like, there must be some way that
that summary doesn't really capture it. Like there's another level
to the movie. Uh, but now that I've seen it,
that does capture it. This film is Peter Weller versus
a rat for 90 minutes. And, uh, some critics have

(01:44):
argued that this might have been better suited as like a,
an anthology piece, uh, like a shorter runtime thing, or
maybe an episode of a horror TV show.

Speaker 2 (01:54):
Yeah. You can definitely see this as a 25 minute
or less tales from the crypt episode. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (02:00):
Uh, you, you could make that argument that it is
a stretched out tales from the crypt, but as it is,
I had a great time with this one. It is
the perfect mix of absurdity with like that. I can't
believe this is a real movie feeling, but that and
equal parts actually good. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:20):
It's, On one level, it's way better than it needs
to be. But actually, I think it is as great
as it needs to be to justify what it is. Again,
a feature-length film about a man fighting a rat in
his own house and destroying his house and possibly his
life in the process. In order to pull that off,

(02:40):
you've got to really dig into it and get into
the meat of what this represents and could represent. And
really make a go of making as great a film
out of it as possible. And I think of Unknown
Origins succeeds. It's just, at the end of the day,
you're just facing that question that I think the filmmakers
ended up having to stare straight in the eyes. And

(03:02):
that is, who was this movie really for? Was there
really an audience for this? It's a film that, knowing
the premise... And I didn't always know the premise. I
wasn't familiar with the title before I was aware of
the premise. But knowing the premise, it's not a movie
that I was necessarily in a huge hurry to see
because it doesn't sound like the sort of film that

(03:24):
offers an escapist horror experience. And it doesn't. It doesn't
really give you that escapism. It gives you more of
a confrontational horror experience, one that involves maybe a fair
amount of self-exploration. And in that, it's great, but it's
maybe not a popcorn-munching horror fest that many people might

(03:46):
have wanted at the time. But for those reasons, I
think that's why it's really found its home via cult
following on home video and so forth.

Speaker 3 (03:56):
You asked who this movie was for, and I think
the answer is it was for Stephen King, because he
famously liked it. And There are a bunch of movies
like this. Is The Boogans an example? Or these movies
that maybe not a lot of people have heard of,
but they were a horror film from the 70s or
80s that Stephen King wrote a favorable review of in

(04:20):
some niche horror magazine at the time and therefore got
a kind of very particular that zone of culture cult following.

Speaker 2 (04:30):
Yeah, I mean, if the king of horror endorses your work,
I mean, it's true today as well, but certainly at
the time, pre-internet, having the magazines and different publications that
would have been read by the fan base and just
having someone like King come out and say, this is
a great rap movie, then people are going to take notice.

Speaker 3 (04:52):
It has a Stephen King-y sense of humor, too.

Speaker 2 (04:55):
Yeah, you could easily imagine it being a King's short story,
though that is not its origin. We do know of
Unknown Origin's origin. We'll get to it in a bit.

Speaker 3 (05:04):
Another thing I learned by watching this film, and this
was not planned at all, between our rerun of the
original episode on Star Trek Wrath of Khan and our
new Weird House Cinema episode from last week on Star
Trek First Contact, We have recently done two different genre

(05:24):
movie riffs on Moby Dick. And here today, we have
a third. Of unknown origin is Moby Dick, except the
whale is a rat, a huge rat. The ocean is
a swanky, recently renovated brownstone. And Ahab is like one
of the secondary characters in American Psycho, played by RoboCop.

Speaker 2 (05:47):
And doesn't Weller's character, Bart, Doesn't he try and kill
the rat with a copy of Moby Dick at one point?
He does indeed.

Speaker 3 (05:54):
It's like Evil Dead 2 when he puts a farewell
to arms on top of the severed hand. I know.

Speaker 2 (05:59):
It sounds like it's too much, but when you're in
the film, it doesn't feel like too much. You definitely
take notice of it, but it doesn't feel like it's
Jump the Shark, per se.

Speaker 3 (06:07):
And he also doesn't just grab a random book off
the shelf. He has been, if you notice, before the
bashing with the book starts, he's reading it. He's just
sitting in his office reading Moby Dick.

Speaker 2 (06:17):
Yeah, yeah. So it is a fascinating film. Again, the
premise is really straightforward, man versus rat. And, you know,
like we've been saying, it certainly could have played well
with standard schlock treatment, shorter format. And it engages those expectations,
but it really does craft an engaging and thought-provoking drama

(06:38):
about midlife crisis, midlife anxiety, the illusion of control in
the modern world, consumerist culture. I mean, it's ultimately a
pretty rich text for interpretation. There are some grisly and
just disgusting moments, to be sure. But I think the
most disturbing moments in the film, for me anyway, are
more about the places we find ourselves midway upon the

(07:01):
journey of our life. Again, it's not escapist horror. It's
very much confrontational horror.

Speaker 3 (07:08):
You're right. It's very much a what-is-life-for kind of movie.
And It's weird that our protagonist is presented as very
ambitious and driven. He's a business executive on the come
up and he's really into getting the next big promotion
and getting the next big raise. He does seem like

(07:30):
already a goal-oriented character, but maybe there is an underlying
and unacknowledged sense of hollowness in that and he finds
more purpose somehow in this more primal struggle of just
trying to kill a rat that he can't get out
of his house.

Speaker 2 (07:46):
I think that's that's a strong read um i think
there's also a sense of uh you know the man
who fights monsters becomes a monster here as well um
and i think one of the another layer that's interesting
here is that i think bart is in large to
a large degree a realistic and likable character and that's

(08:06):
a very key difference between what this film would have
been the story would have been had it been a
Tales from the Crypt episode. Oh, yeah. In which, by
design and by, you know, virtue of the genre, you
would need him to be just a real bastard. Not
a likable character. In order to fit into the sort
of classic Tales from the Crypt sort of mold, you
would be rooting for the rat. And here, you know,

(08:29):
I'm rooting for Bart the whole time. Like, he makes
some bad decisions. Not everything. He's not to say he's
an angel or anything, but, like, you want him to
find a more.
Balanced path forward and he keeps going deeper into this
problem yeah.

Speaker 3 (08:47):
I think that's right uh a part of that is
just peter weller uh you know being so charismatic on
screen but also uh i mean the way he's written
he is not a a morally perfect character certainly like
you say he does a lot of questionable things in
the movie uh but he's he is basically sympathetic uh
and it's also hard to write like a finance company

(09:09):
executive that way, but he, yeah, he comes off as
a guy who's just kind of like struggling and frustrated
and you see how he cares about his son and,
and things like that. And, and so you are basically
on his side. I have seen some people online say
that they are more on the rat side, but I
think it's, it's, it's an open question, which side you take.

Speaker 2 (09:30):
I didn't, I didn't side with the rat at all
on that side. I'm, I, I'm largely anti-rat infestation in life.
And so, you know, it's a complex scenario. Rats are
a problem for humans in part because of what humans
have made out of the world. You know, rats have
been able to thrive in our shadow in ways that

(09:53):
few other species have. And so they have traveled with
us around the world. Our success has been their success.
But with this has come a fair amount of conflict
as well. So, you know, I think it's easy to
hate the rat. It's easy to fall into the same
line of thinking that Bart has regarding the rat. But

(10:13):
it's ultimately a very complex situation between us. But I
never rooted for the rat. Even though I think one...
comes to understand the rat. I think maybe Bart comes
to understand the rat as well. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (10:24):
There are times when the rat is horrifying, but if
you reflect on it, like in the middle of the night,
they have a situation in which they both scare each
other when the rat's just trying to have some toilet time,
but Bart opens up the top of the toilet bowl
and the rat is in the toilet and he screams
and the rat screams and they've both terrified each other.

Speaker 2 (10:44):
I don't think the rat had any business being in
that toilet though. I'm just going to go ahead and
say it.

Speaker 3 (10:49):
Especially in the scene after that, where, uh, the character
cleat explains that the rat was trying to eat his genitals,
which rats apparently do. There are a lot of rat
facts in this movie, some of which are basically true.
Others are just totally made up. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (11:04):
I would say even, even when the facts are incorrect, uh, factually,
they're still spiritually correct. There, there is a, there is a,
an understanding of the rat in this, the pervasive understanding
of the rat is the ultimate survivor. And I think
that is true. And I think the story of the
rat definitely backs that up. But this film should not

(11:26):
be anyone's primary text for understanding rat behavior or biology.

Speaker 3 (11:31):
Now, I guess we should probably give a content warning
at the top. You might have been able to guess
from the synopsis that there is going to be some
violence toward animals in the narrative of this movie. There's
also a part where... where Bart is like reviewing some footage.
The thing is not original footage shot for the movie.
It looks like stock footage, but that it does look

(11:52):
like real footage from a laboratory of like rats actually
hurting each other. So yeah. If you're very sensitive to that,
you might want to skip this.

Speaker 2 (12:00):
Yeah. That, that research portion of the picture is pretty
hard to watch. Um, and it's supposed to be, I mean,
that's the intention is that he's gone down the rabbit
or rat hole on this, this research binge. And, uh,
it is starting to mess with him. Um, Outside of that, though,
outside of the stock footage, bad things happen to rats
and other animals and humans in this film. But it's

(12:23):
not a film, by all accounts, in which rats were
actually harmed. We cannot say that of all the films
we've watched for Weird House Cinema, especially when you get
older films and films, you know, international productions and so forth.
But in the credits, it says, quote, the welfare of
the animals used in this film was considered throughout production.
No animals were ever in danger of being harmed.

Speaker 3 (12:42):
In fact, in the scenes with actors, I don't think
there are ever live rats present. I think it looks
to me like it's only ever like a puppet or
a prop if humans are on screen. And the footage
of real rats is just extreme close-ups where you're just
seeing like a rat face or a rat mouth.

Speaker 2 (13:03):
I didn't go super deep into figuring out how they
did all the different effects. I think we maybe have
some live rats present. in some of the scuttling scenes.
Not sure on that. I think we have a possum
in there standing in for our rat because our rat
is huge. It is essentially a giant rat, which is
to say like possum size. There's also a puppet effect

(13:26):
that's used. So yeah, nobody's turning a flamethrower on the
rats or anything in this picture.

Speaker 3 (13:32):
Question. The movie never addresses this, but I was wondering...
Is it supposed to be a mutant rat or a
monster rat of some kind? Or is it just supposed
to be a normal rat that for some reason is
the size of a cat and extremely aggressive?

Speaker 2 (13:52):
That's a great question. I wonder, too, if the rat,
in a way, it's almost like the rat gets bigger.
And if that is supposed to be something that is
objectively true or if this represents the subjective truth threat
of the rat in Bart's mind because the rat really
becomes like it's not just a rat it is like

(14:13):
a just pervasive all-encompassing threat to the level of control
that he thought he had over his life to the
purpose he thought he had in his life so the
the rat has become larger than life so maybe you
should have something larger than a rat play it you know.

Speaker 3 (14:28):
That's a good point I think it could well be
intended as psychological inflation in the prop rats we see Uh,
but certainly like if it's supposed to be a mutant
rat or something, I don't know what it ever says
in the source novel about where the rat comes from.
The movie has no information at all about where this

(14:48):
rat comes from. There's not like a mutagen ooze origin
story or anything. Yeah. And I might even say it is,
it is of unknown origin.

Speaker 2 (14:56):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (14:57):
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (14:58):
So there is a mutant aspect to this. It's not
directly stated. I could very well imagine that being part
of the text because Certainly you get into rat horror fiction,
and that is sometimes the case. In fact, Stephen King's
own Graveyard Shift gets into, they're not really mutated per se,
but they're like greatly enlarged kind of, you know, eldritch

(15:18):
horror rats that live beneath the cotton mill. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (15:23):
I've never read that one, but yeah. Oh, it's pretty good.
It's a rat, not a bat.

Speaker 2 (15:28):
It's both like rats and bats, bats and rats sort
of fused together, some sort of giant creature. It's pretty great.
And the movie is a lot of fun as well.
But yeah, graveyard shift. I forgot to look up, see
where that, that occurs in comparison. I forget when that
one actually was written and when it was published, maybe
at like a seventies origin. Anyway, I do want to

(15:51):
talk briefly about the title because for, for my money,
I think of unknown origin is a pretty perfect title.
But apparently, minds were very much divided on this. Getting
into some of the extras that we'll discuss, the screenwriter
loved it, thought this was a great title. It's not
the title of the original source material, but the title
that he came up with for the screenplay. But I've

(16:13):
also heard and read that it was maybe generally part
of the marketing campaign that kind of failed to land
this film the audience that anyone had hoped for. It
gets into the more complex question of who it was for,
and was there really a market out there for a
thinking man's man versus rat movie? But I loved it.

(16:37):
I think it's a great title. However, at the same time,
I've sometimes gotten it confused with 1990s without warning.

Speaker 3 (16:43):
Yes, me too.

Speaker 2 (16:45):
There's not a lot of direct comparison there. We don't
really have the same words in the titles, but without warning,
of unknown origin. I kind of like mix them together.

Speaker 3 (16:57):
I would get of unknown origin mixed up with without warning.
And I can't remember the title of it now, but
one of the two cattle mutilation movies we've talked about. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 2 (17:09):
There's endangered species, but then there's the return.

Speaker 3 (17:12):
And then I'm thinking the return.

Speaker 2 (17:15):
What's the kind of erotic thriller with Donald Sutherland in it?
What's the title on that one?

Speaker 3 (17:21):
Oh, sorry, we just had to look it up because
we couldn't figure this out. But it's Don't Look Now,
which is actually, I haven't seen it in a while,
but I remember it being a great horror movie. A
very dark, difficult, complex, psychological horror movie, but an excellent one.

Speaker 2 (17:35):
Yeah, and I haven't, this one is on my list,
I haven't seen it yet. But the title alone just
kind of like falls into a similar category. Like, Don't
Look Now, what am I not looking at? Of unknown origin,
what is of unknown origin? Without warning, what has occurred?
And I guess these are great evocative titles, but sometimes
you can maybe confuse them with each other. All right.

(18:00):
We'll get into more of this as we proceed, but
we'll go ahead and just say, hey, if you want
to watch Of Unknown Origin, luckily it is, I think,
pretty widely available. And Vinegar Syndrome recently put out a
physical release of the picture. This is the one you
picked up, right, Joe?

Speaker 3 (18:15):
Yeah, I've got the two discs here. So the UHD
disc looks great, but I really like that it is
at once crisp, but preserving that 80s, you know, George
Cosmato's film grain, like it has that look. So it's
still a little bit rough looking. There's some kind of
texture of film that comes through that's nice. And then

(18:38):
on the Blu-ray disc, there are tons of extras that
I didn't have time to get into in full. I
watched a few of them Including a new interview that
they did for this set with Peter Weller about the
movie that I definitely want to talk about in a
minute here. Because I don't know if I'd ever seen
an interview with Peter Weller before, but he is great

(18:59):
in this kind of setting. He has a great like
storytelling sensibility. You could tell he's like a big personality
and maybe also a teller of tall tales. I'm not sure,
but you kind of wonder about that. But anyway, that
extra was great, and I want to talk about some
of the stories he tells.

Speaker 2 (19:16):
Awesome, awesome. Yeah, that one being newer is not on
the disc that I rented from Videodrome. Here in Atlanta,
I rented the older Aero Blu-ray that came out several
years back. But it has some of the features that
are then included in the Vinegar Syndrome. So I watched
a couple of those features, and I'll refer back to
those as we go as well.

Speaker 3 (19:36):
Did you watch the interview with Louis Delgrande called Are
You the Guy from Scanners?

Speaker 2 (19:42):
Yeah, yeah, that one's great. He's such a character.

Speaker 3 (19:53):
Well, are we about to do the connections?

Speaker 2 (19:56):
Yeah, let's get into it. Starting at the top with
George P. Kosmatos, who lived 1941 through 2005, Greek-Italian film
director and screenwriter and father of contemporary director Panos Kosmatos.
whose work we've covered on the show before. George P. Cosmatos,
Cosmatos the Elder here, his directing credits go back to

(20:17):
1971 Sin, starring Raquel Welch, a UK-produced film made in Cyprus.
He previously served as an assistant director on such films
as 64's Zorba the Greek. His Italian productions of the
1970s consisted of 73's Massacre in Rome with Richard Burton.
And 76 is the Cassandra Crossing that has Sophia Loren,

(20:39):
Richard Harris, Martin Sheen, and O.J. Simpson in it. Followed
by the U.K. film Escape to Athena that has Roger
Moore and a rather good cast. To understand that one
was not really a big hit. And then 1983's Of
Unknown Origin was his first North American film. A Canadian production.

(20:59):
It's set in New York City, but it's filmed in Montreal.
And I mean, it's it's very Canadian, as we'll be discussing.
It's like I'm pretty much a fully Canadian supporting cast.
It has some of the key effects people were also
effects people on scanners and Cronenberg. There are numerous Cronenberg

(21:21):
connections to be made here.

Speaker 3 (21:23):
It feels and looks in many ways like a Cronenberg movie.
I don't think Cronenberg would. pick this script to do
as a movie. It doesn't exactly have his sensibility, but aesthetically,
it's very much in the Cronenberg zone.

Speaker 2 (21:37):
Yeah, I was thinking about this earlier. It's like, what
if Cronenberg had directed it? And then I'm like, well,
what would be the Cronenberg-y sort of twist? Something like
using computers to sync minds with the rat or something?
There'd be some extra speculative level, I would imagine, if
Cronenberg were fully involved in it.

Speaker 3 (21:54):
I think so. If it were Cronenberg, I it would
be a little bit less funny and playful. And I
think it would go harder into the weird stuff.

Speaker 2 (22:05):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (22:05):
He would add in some body horror in the dream sequences. Uh,
like there's a scene where the rat bursts out of
a birthday cake in a dream. And I think Cronenberg
would probably have the rat bursting out of a body. Right. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (22:19):
That would make sense. Yeah. All right. But anyway, of
unknown origin. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (22:24):
83.

Speaker 2 (22:24):
Uh, we'll talk more about how it was received, how
it did, But he ended up following this up with
85's Rambo First Blood Part 2, which we already mentioned
as being a sequel to First Blood, but also the
first proper Rambo film. It was a major hit. It
had Stallone and Richard Crenna in it. And then he
followed that up with another film that we've mentioned briefly

(22:46):
on the show in our connections, Cobra in 86. That
one also had Stallone in it, along with Brigitte Nielsen
and Brian Thompson, Shao Kahn from Mortal Kombat Annihilation.

Speaker 3 (22:57):
I haven't seen Cobra, but I kind of want to.
I think I've heard that it's over-the-top pursuit of 80s
action movie themes actually does push it kind of into
weird territory.

Speaker 1 (23:10):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (23:10):
Yeah, so that one's on my list. But one that
we've both seen before is his 89 film Leviathan, an
amazing underwater sci-fi horror film, one of several that came
out in 89. And it, again, had Peter Weller uh,
in the starring role along with a great supporting cast,
just a real fun film. One that has been on

(23:33):
my short list to come back around to on weird
house cinema, but I don't know, just haven't had the,
the underwater 89 buzz recently, but, uh, I think we
might come back to it.

Speaker 3 (23:43):
I think we've talked about this on the show before,
but there were like five different underwater horror movies from 1989.
It was a, it was a blitz. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (23:51):
The top three being the abyss, which, um, I don't
think I'd want to cover The Abyss. I remember liking it,
but it's the most mainstream of the bunch.

Speaker 3 (24:01):
And then you get the VHS tape to watch the
three-hour cut.

Speaker 2 (24:06):
Yeah, I mean, no hate for the film. It's just
maybe not a great Weird House selection. But then the
other two were definitely Leviathan and Deep Star Six. Either
of those, really, that's where the competition comes into play.
Do we watch Leviathan or do we watch Deep Star Six?
A lot of things in common between the two, but
they're also very different in their overall delivery.

Speaker 3 (24:25):
I think they're both great examples of memorable deaths for
great 80s character actors. Like Leviathan has people like Daniel Stern.
Richard Crenn is in it too, isn't he?

Speaker 2 (24:40):
Yeah, yeah, he is. That's right.

Speaker 3 (24:42):
And Meg Foster.

Speaker 2 (24:44):
Yeah, Meg Foster has a great role in it. Yeah,
as a corporate villain. Terrific cast, top to bottom.

Speaker 3 (24:49):
But Deep Star Six has one of the corporate creeps
from RoboCop, one of the OCP guys, not Dick Jones,
but his rival, the other guy, I forget the character's name.
But the actor who plays him goes through explosive decompression
in Deep Star Six, a very memorable scene.

Speaker 2 (25:08):
Yeah, so either of those. But with Cosmatos, Leviathan was
his entry in this sub-genre. He also had the movie
Tombstone in 93, the Western. Probably, I would guess, his
most well-known and successful film. It has a terrific cast,
headlined by Kurt Russell and Val Kilmer. Like, this is

(25:28):
a film I remember growing up seeing it, liking it
quite a bit. But it was also a film that
everybody seemed to like. Like, you know, it was a
cool 90s Western. And it had some great performances. And
especially Val Kilmer. Yeah, very memorable in that.

Speaker 3 (25:45):
He plays Doc Watson, or not Doc Watson, Doc Watson,
the guitar player. No, yeah, Doc Holiday, who has tuberculosis
or something.

Speaker 2 (25:56):
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 (25:58):
So he's always coughing, but he's also full of charm
and devilish wit.

Speaker 2 (26:03):
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 (26:04):
I've never seen it in full. I would like to.

Speaker 2 (26:06):
Yeah, I remember it as being a lot of fun. Again,
I haven't seen it since VHS days, but a lot
of fun. And then, finally, Shadow Conspiracy in 97. This
was an action thriller that I have not seen, starring
Charlie Sheen, Donald Sutherland, and Linda Hamilton. This was also
the year that George's wife died, and then I think
various personal health struggles prevented him from helming another film

(26:29):
after this. But, I mean, you look at the films
that he directed, especially these North American, like, 80s action
and action-adjacent films, you know, quite a mark he ends
up leaving. And coming back to his son, Panos, I
think Panos has done a tremendous job in his own right,
in ways playing into some of the sensibilities of his father,

(26:52):
but also clearly drawing on these other wilder, weirder, psychedelic
genre influences. And for me, he continues to stand out
as one of the contemporary directors out there that I'm
always interested in. Whatever he's working on, I'm going to
see it. I want to know what he's working towards
and what the final form might look like.

Speaker 3 (27:12):
There is one part in that interview with Peter Weller
on the Vinegar Syndrome disc where he's talking about the differences.
He really contrasts Cosmatos the Elder with Panos and talks
about how their personalities are complete opposite. So he characterizes
George Cosmatos as extremely... loud and forceful and persuasive and

(27:38):
aggressive and like a really like fun guy to hang
out with but he also describes him as stereotypically mediterranean
in that he's like going to be just yelling at
you and putting his hands on you while he's talking
um and weller says he actually personally became louder through
his friendship with george uh whereas he you know says

(27:59):
that the Panos is exactly the opposite. He's like incredibly
quiet and reserved and thoughtful. And Weller, Weller chalks this
up to him not being raised in the Mediterranean. I
don't know if that's actually the reason, but, uh, yeah,
I thought that was funny.

Speaker 2 (28:15):
All right. Well, let's, let's move on to the, the
writing here. Uh, so again, this was a novel. This
was originally a novel titled the visitor by Chauncey G. Parker,
the third of the 1926 through 2013, former aid, um,
to former UN ambassador Adlai Stevenson, and then later an
English professor. This is his best known, possibly his only

(28:36):
published work, published novel anyway. I was looking around for more.
It looked like there was maybe a title out there
that might have been another work of fiction that he published,
but this maybe is the only one. But he was
out in paperback. This was like the heyday. I guess
people might have purchased this at the airport or something. Again,
I haven't read it. If anyone out there has read
the original novel, and it does seem to be readily

(28:58):
available still. You can pick it up in physical form
or digital. If you've read The Visitor, then certainly write
in and answer some of these questions we have about
the story and the original story.

Speaker 3 (29:12):
As far as I know, no relation to the movie
The Visitor, which may come up on Weird House one day.

Speaker 2 (29:17):
Oh yeah, because that's an Atlanta film for sure.

Speaker 1 (29:20):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (29:21):
All right.

Speaker 2 (29:21):
So that's the original book. And then the screenplay adaptation
was by Brian Taggart, who lived 1938 through 2019. American
writer who'd worked in theater and non-genre TV work before
being drawn into horror. He wrote the 1977 TV movie
The Spell, followed by the 82 film Theon. Visiting Hours.
This is the one where Michael Ironside plays a serial killer.

(29:44):
And it has a very signature... I remember this VHS
box from when I was a little kid in Canada
going to a video rental store that was in somebody's house.

Speaker 1 (29:56):
And.

Speaker 2 (29:57):
they had the horror boxes there. And I remember this
one cause it has like a, it's kind of like
pixelated skull on, uh, you know, that it's, it's, it's
kind of like partially embedded in my mind. So, but
on the top, off the top of my head, I
can't remember if it's supposed to be like a, um, uh,
you know, like a skyline or if it's like a
TV set, but it's got that skull that would, it

(30:17):
was very impressive.

Speaker 3 (30:19):
I don't know. It's just hard for me to imagine
Michael Ironside as a killer.

Speaker 2 (30:22):
Yeah. But, um, uh, speaking of strong, uh, Strong Canadian connections, right?
Let's see. Taggart followed up of Unknown Origin with work
on the TV series V. 1985's The New Kids. The
1986 Rutger Hauer movie Wanted Dead or Alive. I'm not

(30:42):
sure I've seen this one. He's not a blind ninja
in this one.

Speaker 3 (30:48):
What is that one called?

Speaker 2 (30:49):
Blind Justice, something like that.

Speaker 3 (30:51):
Blind Fury.

Speaker 2 (30:52):
Blind Fury, okay.

Speaker 3 (30:52):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (30:54):
Let's see. Taggart also wrote 1988's Poltergeist 3. This is
definitely a high-rise movie. This is like Poltergeist in the high-rise, right?

Speaker 1 (31:02):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (31:03):
I never saw this concept. He did The Omen 4,
The Awakening. This was a TV film. And he did
1997's Trucks, an adaptation of the same Stephen King story
that King himself adapted into Maximum Overdrive.

Speaker 3 (31:18):
They did it twice?

Speaker 2 (31:21):
Somebody did it a second time. I don't know. Um,
I mean, maximum overdrive makes some definite choices in adapting
the original King story. The original King story is less, um,
believe it or not less over the top. So, uh,
presumably that's what they set out to do with trucks,
but I haven't seen 97 trucks. I've only seen maximum

(31:42):
overdrive and read the original story.

Speaker 3 (31:44):
Does the story have a vending machine kill somebody by
shooting cans into their crotch?

Speaker 2 (31:50):
I don't think so. The main thing I remember about
the short story is it had a very evocative ending
where a human character is looking up into the sky
and he sees airliners flying and he's wondering if there
are any people on them or if it's just the
machines they're carrying on. So it had some nice moments,
as I recall. That's the only beat from it that
I distinctly remember. But anyway, Brian Taggart, there's an interview

(32:14):
with him on the Arrow disc. I'm assuming this is
probably on the Vinegar Syndrome release as well. And it's
a pretty fun little interview. He talks, breaks down some
of the challenges of the project and also, you know,
how it was a critical hit, but failed to find
an audience. And he praised some of the performances in
the film, especially Peter Weller, just saying like Peter Weller
was able to like hit some of these lines that

(32:36):
he'd written and or adapted in such a way that
he was able to like encapsulate everything he was going
for with the screenplay, which is pretty cool.

Speaker 3 (32:44):
It's a good feeling as a writer when somebody performs
your material well.

Speaker 2 (32:50):
Yeah, yeah, or elevates it. Yeah, that's the best part.
All right, so let's get into the cast. We're talking
about Peter Weller already. He plays Bart Hughes. Weller was
born in 1947. This is our third Peter Weller Weird
House selection as we've covered 87's Robocop and 2022's The Viewing.

(33:10):
That's the one directed by Panos Cosmatos. Acclaimed American actor
of stage, screen, and TV. Also a TV director and
Italian Renaissance art history expert. He has a PhD in
the subject.

Speaker 3 (33:23):
He mentions this a couple times in the interview. It's
like he does want you to know that he has
a serious career as well.

Speaker 2 (33:32):
Outside of his academic career, he's probably best known for
the first two Robocop films for 84's Buckaroo Banzai, 89's Leviathan,
and 91's Naked Lunch, the Cronenberg film. But Of Unknown
Origin is before all of this. So prior to Of
Unknown Origin, his TV credits went back to 73, like

(33:53):
very small parts. His first feature film was 79's Butch
and Sundance, The Early Days, followed by Just Tell Me
What You Want in 1980, both supporting roles. And then
in 82, he had a supporting role in the Alan
Parker film starring Albert Finney, Shoot the Moon. And next
came Of Unknown Origin. So this was, as far as

(34:14):
I can tell, his first starring film role.

Speaker 3 (34:17):
Yeah. And in that interview, he starts off talking like
the very first thing he talks about there is the
other films he had done in his career before doing
Of Unknown Origin. Almost like he's trying to emphasize a
contrast of a sort. He's like, you know, my first
few movies, I was very lucky because I got to
work with great directors like, you know, Alan Parker and

(34:39):
Sidney Lumet, uh, and with actors like, uh, Ali McGraw
and Albert Finney and Diane Keaton. And then he's like,
and then one day I got a call about this
rat movie. Um, so I don't know. And he doesn't, um,
disparage the movie. He's like very positive and complimentary about
it in the interview. But I do think he's trying

(35:01):
to emphasize a contrast that he didn't start in B-movies
or whatever. His earliest movies were with serious directors making
acclaimed dramas, and then he moved on to Of Unknown Origin.

Speaker 2 (35:15):
Yeah, but he really does seem to give it his
all here.

Speaker 3 (35:18):
Oh, yeah.

Speaker 2 (35:19):
And I think that speaks to his professionalism. But also,
looking back, it could also be the fact that this
was a big shot for him. He's starring in a
film now. He's, he's got the lead role and he's
got to deliver on it. He's going to do the research.
He's going to provide the input. And, and also it
sounds like too, you know, maybe a little, a little
touchy at times about the way things were coming through and,

(35:41):
you know, not being able to see the full picture.

Speaker 3 (35:43):
Right. Yeah, that's right.

Speaker 2 (35:44):
Uh, so you mentioned that he ends up taking this
detour into the genre work and certainly that we see
that to a large extent, because up next we get
84 is the adventures of Buckaroo Banzai across the eighth dimension.
which is definitely in the weird cult zone. Uh, but, uh,
and then from there, you know, onto the, many of
the films you're more familiar with, including the ones I

(36:06):
mentioned already, but, but for this film, like people took note, uh,
he won best actor at the Paris film festival for
of unknown origin, uh, and George P. Cosmatos also won.
So it was, uh, uh, I think earlier on, uh,
certainly a critical hit, uh, with key critics. And, The
disappointment was that it didn't find the larger commercial audience

(36:29):
on top of that.

Speaker 3 (36:30):
Was it the Paris Film Festival, or was it specifically
the Paris Science Fiction Film Festival? Because that's what I
thought he said in the interview.

Speaker 2 (36:38):
I was going off of what's on IMDb, and it
just says Paris Film Festival. But I don't know enough
about the Paris Film Festival. I don't know if this
could be wrapping up some sort of... uh, you know,
some sort of a, a genre side project that they
also do. But, um, yeah, it's, it's listed as Paris
film festival, um, yeah. Best actor in 1983.

Speaker 3 (37:00):
He makes a big bit of it in the interview
where he's like, I have been nominated for, but never
won a, you know, Oscar and like names, all these
different awards, uh, that he, uh, where he's a nominee,
but never a winner. But then he says, the one
thing I actually won best actor for was this thing. Um,

(37:20):
And it was, I thought he said like the Paris,
I don't know if it was science fiction and fantasy
or science fiction awards or something like that, but maybe
it's just Paris film festival. I don't, I don't know.

Speaker 2 (37:29):
Yeah. At any rate, I mean, I'd say he earned
it cause he's really, really good in this.

Speaker 3 (37:33):
He's great.

Speaker 2 (37:34):
And I feel like the film, a film like this
really needs a solid performance grounding at all. And it
changes the movie dramatically depending on what sort of, uh, actor,
what sort of performance you would have at the center.
You know, you could imagine if you had like a real, um,
I don't know, like a real like energetic and physical performance,
not to say that Peter Wellers isn't physical, but I

(37:55):
feel like he has this steely cerebral quality to his
performance that works especially well here. You know, one of
those performances where you can see the gears turning, you
get the sense of the emotional and psychological weight of
everything that's happening, even when he's like physically not moving.

Speaker 3 (38:13):
He comes off as naturally reserved, uh, Which is funny
because that doesn't really seem to be his personality when
you get into the interviews. But the way it comes
through in the movie is that he seems to be
a person who's naturally reserved but kind of becomes unleashed

(38:33):
by this situation. But yeah, so are you ready for
me to talk about some more things from this interview?

Speaker 2 (38:39):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because like I say, I didn't have
access to this one, so this is all new to me.

Speaker 3 (38:43):
One of the things that really is clear is just
how much he loved working with George Cosmatos and how
fun Cosmatos was. You get the idea that Cosmatos was
just a really intense and funny and big collaborator. Somebody

(39:05):
who would just roll with you and maybe improvise with
you and come up with ideas on the fly and
was just very fun to work with. And also you
sort of get the sense, like very fun to party with,
like Willard Weller talks about while they're making this movie
that they were hanging out in Montreal and he was like,
it was a really swinging town at the time. It
was like the Paris of North America. He talks about

(39:27):
all the good restaurants they went to and stuff. But
Weller also talks about how when he made the movie,
he saw this character as very much like himself at
the time. He didn't really have a family yet. He
was a young, ambitious guy on the come up. He
just started making money in these other movies. Uh, he

(39:47):
had a cool apartment, so it was very easy for
him to slip into this character who seemed to be
in a, in a similar situation, you know, like a,
an executive who's on the way up, who's making money
now and just like has just gotten this nice place
to live. Um, he mentions also, uh, that he apparently

(40:07):
loves researching new subject matter. And we'll sometimes do this
when he gets into a movie, he'll go and read
a bunch of books about whatever it's about. Uh, so
much like his character in this movie, Peter Weller actually
went down a rabbit hole researching rats. Uh, and the
crazy thing is he says that the rat speech, there's

(40:27):
a scene in the middle of this movie where, uh,
the character Bart, like completely like creeps out and ruins
a dinner party by giving this bizarre speech about rats.
And it turns out that this was not originally part
of the story. This was inserted by Peter Weller himself
with permission from George Cosmatos to make use of all

(40:51):
this reading he had done. So I don't know exactly
what the scene was like in the original story because
it does seem that there's. this idea of a dinner
party more woven into the full narrative. Maybe it was
originally a more truncated scene or something, but in the
movie he gives this long speech from his research just
about how awful rats are in every possible way.

Speaker 2 (41:12):
And it is not landing with the audience. I felt
kind of seen by this because, you know, like you
and I are always having to do it to research
and really getting into some sort of a, at times,
odd subject matter. And then our loved ones, our families
are the ones that have to hear about it outside
of the recording. So I think sometimes, at least from

(41:35):
my point of view, sometimes my family has to suffer
through some of these things and are maybe a little
sick of hearing about it. They're like, isn't it time
you go and record this so you can get it
out of your system?

Speaker 3 (41:44):
It's true. I think I've kind of mastered some ways
of changing the subject when people ask me what I'm
working on, just because it's like, They are asking, but
I'm like, well, am I going to start talking about,
you know, like parasites or whatever?

Speaker 2 (41:59):
Let them have it. You just let them know what
you're doing.

Speaker 1 (42:01):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (42:01):
Uh, another thing Weller talks about here is how living
in New York necessarily entails rat consciousness because, so you
live in this, you know, big, very civilized city. There
was sort of the peak of, you know, he, he
views it as sort of a peak of civilization in
a way. But necessarily part of that is you see

(42:25):
rats everywhere. You see them coming out of your favorite
restaurant and you're like, what were they doing inside? And
so there's this weird contrast that like rats are interwoven
in human society in such a way that like the
more human we make a place, the more we make
it kind of inevitable that there will be rats there

(42:46):
and maybe rats even in great abundance.

Speaker 1 (42:48):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (42:49):
Yeah, I mean, this is true. I was researching, doing
some fresher research on rats not too long ago. And
like one of the things that you read about is that,
I mean, rats are great survivors in general. Rats are
great survivors in part of, you know, even like past
extinction events because they thrive in certain environmental conditions that

(43:09):
are very much like the artificial conditions that we create
through human infrastructure, right? You know, like the in the
walls of our of our homes or crawl spaces and,
you know, all the inner workings of the modern city
is certainly the modern metropolis. Like we have recreated the
sorts of environments that they do especially well in. And

(43:30):
then on top of that, you know, all of our
refuse and our food waste, all of this directly feeds
the rat as well. We have created like a perfect
shadow in which they can live.

Speaker 3 (43:41):
I very much agree with him in this regard, this
interesting way that like civilization and certain like urban environments
just sort of push rat consciousness. And this does change
it because we have to see them. Uh, you know,
they're not always going to be hidden and those encounters
cause us to think about them and, you know, change
how we feel about them. But also there's, there's another

(44:03):
part where he's talking about a similar subject where I
think I'm going to have to disagree with him. He,
He gives a speech in favor of feeding feral cats
because he claims that they kill rats. So he says like,
you know, in New York, you're not supposed to feed
feral cats, but in Rome and Venice, he says people
feed feral cats and then you never see rats there.

(44:25):
First of all, I don't know if that characterization is
true that you never see rats in Rome or Venice,
but also wouldn't it be the case that if having
feral cats around does make people see fewer rats, is
it really that they're eating and killing the rats or
just that the rats are coming out in the street less,
you see them less?

Speaker 2 (44:44):
Yeah, I think that's far more likely. I actually did
some research on this as well not too long ago.
There are studies that have looked into this, particularly with
New York City. And what they found is that on
the whole, New York City feral cats and or outdoor
cats are largely not messing with the rats like you

(45:06):
think of a rat like rats get fairly big not
as big as they are in this movie but fairly
big they're they're very good at evading capture and predation
they are also if cornered can put up a bit
of a fight and for most feral cats in New
York City it's not worth the effort there's just gonna
be an easier meal out there than a rat be

(45:27):
it a bird or or a handout or, you know,
something that's been thrown away. They're just far easier things
to get than a rat. And so they're not really
going after the rat. So this idea that a feral
cat population is going to keep that in check, not
really true. It just may drive it out of sight
a little more, if anything.

Speaker 3 (45:45):
Another thing I would think, I'm no expert on, you know,
rat animal control, but I would also tend to think
putting food out for cats means you're also inadvertently putting
food out for rats.

Speaker 1 (45:56):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (45:56):
I mean, rats are opportunistic omnivores. They're going to eat
a lot of different things. And that's one of the
reasons they're such great survivors.

Speaker 3 (46:05):
Anyway, another thing, this was a funny digression in this interview.
Peter Weller says, I don't look at movies. He quotes
fellow actor Christopher Walken, whom Weller claims once told him, Peter,
I don't watch movies because if they're good, I'm jealous.
I'm jealous that he's not in them. And if they're bad,

(46:25):
I'm sorry I watched. Sorry I spent my time on them.
So I guess maybe that's a dilemma for some actors.
I don't know how true this really is that Peter
Weller never watches movies. But he says he did watch
Of Unknown Origin recently at an Academy screening with his son.
And he says he was surprised how good he thought
it was and how good he thought his own performance was.

(46:47):
He was proud of it. Um, he, he talks about
how Cosmodos, the elder gave him a lot of room
to improvise and like fill out the character with things
that weren't in the script. Uh, and I think this
ran against, um, some things that gave him pause when
he was actually making the movie. Like he talked about

(47:08):
the experience of, this was the first movie he ever
made where he got to review dailies. So the other
movies he'd made, he never got to look at dailies. Um,
and when he watched them for the first time on
this movie, he reacted terribly. Like he thought it looked awful.
He thought his own performance was bad. And, uh, and
George tried to assure him like, no, no, no, this
you're doing great. Everything is going to come together. Uh,

(47:31):
and it'll, it'll all make sense and look great once
we have the editing and the narrative, uh, you know,
in sequence. And Weller agreed later once he saw the
whole movie put together that it did work out great,
but he, he apparently just can't stand looking at his
own acting piecemeal, like one shot or scene at a
time in the dailies. And I can imagine that could

(47:51):
be true. I don't know. Like if you're, if I
don't know, I've never had this experience myself, obviously, but it, it,
It seems like it might be a little jarring to
see your own performance divorced from the narrative and the
experience of the finished product.

Speaker 2 (48:08):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (48:09):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (48:09):
And obviously it's a complex situation for an actor to
view their own work. And there are all these other factors.
Like you were there when the sausage was made and
you're bringing all of that in. So you can't really,
or it would be very difficult to really objectively view
your own performance because you're, you know, the whole story
that went into it, you have like emotional moments. connection

(48:31):
to everything on the other side of the camera. It's
kind of neat to hear, though, that he came back
to it and was like, yeah, it's good. It's a
good performance, good film.

Speaker 3 (48:42):
One last thing from this interview is Weller talking about
the themes of the movie. This is one area where
I really did not end up agreeing with him. He
was trying to say, what does he think the main
theme of unknown origin is it's sort of that nature
is inescapable that like even within urban civilization natural life

(49:05):
can be hidden but it can't be conquered or eliminated
it's always going to creep in and it will survive
and evade our attempts to tame it he connects this
to like a George Carlin bit about how you know uh,
environmentalism is sometimes framed as protecting earth, but actually earth
is going to be fine. It's we that need to
be protected, you know, from it changing in ways that

(49:28):
harm us, uh, which is not completely true, but partially true.
There's some truth to that. Um, there, uh, but I,
I could see how you could view that as the
theme of the movie, but that's not what I got
from watching it. Like, doesn't... Bart has a triumphant victory
over the rat in the end. Like, he kills the rat.

(49:49):
He solves the problem. It seemed to me that the
themes were more about human psychology than about, like, nature
or ecology. It's like about pride and destructive obsession.

Speaker 2 (50:01):
I think so as well. I mean, but on the
other hand, it is... It is a rich enough text
that I think you can apply different interpretations to it.
I think you can look at the rat as a
number of different things in life. And I think if
one thing is true of life, there will always be
a rat. Depending on where you are, there's a very

(50:23):
good chance it'll be an actual rat. But it could
be a rat of different sorts. You're going to find
yourself in a situation, perhaps, like our character, where you
think everything is going swell. Things are where they need
to be, and you are, above all things, in control.
But then there is going to be this instigator, this force,

(50:43):
if not this actual intelligence out there that is working
against you. And how are you going to respond to that?
You don't have any control over it. You only have
control over your reaction to it. And this film, being
a horror film and a drama, It portrays a man
who very much is not in control of his reaction.
He is not in control at all. Maybe at the

(51:04):
very end, he begins to regain that control. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (51:07):
You're watching him lose his grip. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (51:10):
Yeah. But in a very, I think, very believable and
nerve-wracking way. So, yeah, very well done.

Speaker 3 (51:25):
Okay, should we talk about some of the rest of
the cast?

Speaker 2 (51:27):
Yeah, let's do, and I'm not going to go in
the build order for the rest of the cast. I'm
going to go in like by family faction order. I
think that's going to be the most sensible. So beginning
with the Hughes family, we've already talked about Bart, but
he also has a wife and a child. His wife
is Meg, Meg Hughes, and she's played by Shannon Tweed,
born 1957. This is Newfoundland's own playboy, playmate of the

(51:52):
year in 82. And that's, that's not, Newfoundland Playboy. That's
like worldwide Playboy. There's no such thing as just Newfoundland Playboy.
But Chan and Tweed rather.

Speaker 3 (52:02):
That would be such a funny regional publication.

Speaker 2 (52:05):
It would. We'd have to ask Newfies to give us
a little more insight on how that joke might be
fully told. But at any rate, she had done a
couple of small things and TV projects the previous year
before of Unknown Origin, but this was her first big film.
And I think it's pretty interesting because While the film
does lean into her obvious sex appeal and, you know,

(52:27):
there's a bit of stunt casting to this and all,
the role itself does not demand a former Playboy centerfold
or anything like that. I mean, they lean into the
sex appeal, but this is not a role that has
to be sexy, right?

Speaker 3 (52:41):
It's a fairly straightforward family character. I mean, so the
movie is mainly about Bart, and the other characters... No
other character in the movie has a lot of depth.
It's like him. And then so everybody else is their
relationship to him is their defining trait. But she is
a wife and mother character who comes off as, yeah,

(53:04):
is fairly straightforwardly characterized. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (53:07):
So Tweed would go on to do a lot more
TV work, film roles, especially in the erotic thriller genre.
And her other films include 1989's Cannibal Women in the
Avocado Jungle of Death. And she is apparently an uncredited
body double in the 1983 horror movie Curtains, which I
haven't seen. It has a very creepy bit of poster

(53:28):
art for it. But according to, I think, the movie
database and Letterboxd, she's a body double in that one.

Speaker 3 (53:36):
In this movie, one thing that's kind of understatedly funny
is that– it's about Bart being alone in his house
for this week when his wife and son have left
on a vacation with, uh, with his wife's family. And, uh,
so he's going through this madness, but like every time
he gets on the phone with Shannon Tweed, she's like

(53:57):
playing tennis or she's at the pool. She's just like
having a great living her best life. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (54:04):
So, uh, you know, not a lot to this role,
but I think she's good here. I think this is
a good performance for what's asked of her.

Speaker 3 (54:09):
Sure.

Speaker 2 (54:11):
And then the son is Peter Hughes, played by Leif Anderson,
born 1974. Child actor who is, I believe, still active
today as an adult. This was his first film, followed
by the 1988 haunted anatomy doll movie, Pin, which I
haven't seen. And then he appeared in a 1992 episode
of Are You Afraid of the Dark? And then was

(54:32):
later in 1999's Storm of the Century, an adaptation of
a Stephen King work, or at least a Stephen King screenplay.
I can't remember the origin story on that one.

Speaker 3 (54:41):
I think it was originally written for TV by Stephen King.

Speaker 2 (54:45):
An original TV miniseries.

Speaker 3 (54:47):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (54:49):
All right. So that's the family unit. Breaking out a
little bit into the neighborhood, going street level. In some cases,
like sub-street level. We have just two main characters. These
are kind of, these are sort of Bart's allies in
the war against Rat. The most important being the character Cleet,
played by Louis Delgrande, born 1943. he's the superintendent of

(55:11):
a neighboring apartment building.

Speaker 3 (55:13):
Right.

Speaker 2 (55:13):
And he ends up just helping Bart out with these, uh,
these problems and ultimately giving a lot of rat fighting advice.

Speaker 3 (55:19):
Yes.

Speaker 2 (55:20):
Yeah. So we've discussed still grand before in our episode
on 81 scanners, uh, because he is the scanner whose
head blows up in the film's most famous scene. Like
if you haven't seen scanners and you should see scanners,
cause it's great. Uh, he, he's the guy whose head
blows up and it ends up being like a gist
sensation for really decades.

Speaker 3 (55:42):
Right. Um, uh, but, uh, Michael Ironside is sitting next
to him going like, Ooh, he's sitting there going and
then his head explodes.

Speaker 2 (55:52):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (55:52):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (55:52):
In the, um, it's, I mean, it's such an iconic
moment in film history and in horror cinema and in
special effects as well that, uh, in that, uh, interview
bit with, uh, with, with Louis Delgrin, he mentioned that
like effects guys in particular, would come up and essentially
take selfies with him. They were like, you're the guy
whose head blows up. You're the guy from Scanners. It's

(56:14):
almost like they're getting a selfie with the special effect
and not just the human being that was involved.

Speaker 3 (56:22):
In the effect. That's pretty awesome. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (56:26):
So as I went into when we discussed Scanners, I
was familiar with Louis Delgrande. because he was on a
popular Canadian series that ran from 81 through 87 called
Seeing Things about a very manic, clairvoyant journalist. So a
guy that sees things and gets some idea of what's
going to happen. And in episodic fashion, I vaguely remember

(56:51):
him solving murders and whatnot. Or preventing murders. You can imagine.
This was a series that during its run, I was
living in Canada with my family, and we would watch
it on CBC. We only had one TV channel, and
we were in Newfoundland at the time. We had one
TV channel, so we would watch whatever was on. Sometimes
it was seeing things. And so I vaguely remember watching

(57:14):
the show, and I remember his fun performance on there.
It was much later that I found out that, oh,
the guy whose head blows up in scanners is this
guy from this television show that I watched with my
family back in the 80s. But he's an American-Canadian actor
who was active through 2016, and his other credits include

(57:36):
the 1981 horror film Happy Birthday to Me, and appearances
on such notable Canadian genre TV shows as Lex and
the 90s Outer Limits series, but not an episode of
that that I think I've seen. That interview with him, though,
is worth checking out. He's a very jovial, kind of
manic guy, has some really fun energy. The way he

(57:59):
describes it, like he's an actor who is really good
at sort of like pulling back from that high energy
that maybe is a little more of his natural vibe
and getting into this vibe that is, for film, seen
as more realistic and natural, but then with an ability
to like ramp it up and be ramped down from
that as needed by the director. So, you know, he

(58:21):
has great straight man energy in like scanners, you know,
comes off as kind of like a nerdy intellectual scanner type.
whose head then explodes. And in this movie, he gets
to have a lot more fun. He's more of your
working Joe. You know, he's the maintenance guy at the
apartment next door. He has a lot of, you know,

(58:41):
he has army stories. He has stories about fighting rats.
He has information to share. He has street level information
to share with our character who is, you know, who's
ascending up from street level, who is already, you know,
at least in his workplace, up in the stratosphere of
the high rises.

Speaker 3 (58:57):
He's got a little bit of the the cultural archetype
of the post Vietnam paranoid survivalist though he's not fully
in that it's just a bit of that in him
otherwise he just comes off as a. slightly weird kind
of vulgar, but also kind of nervous dude. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (59:16):
Great, great energy. And without, but without ever really feeling
like a caricature, you know? Yeah. Um, it's, it does
feel for the most part, natural, believable, like, like, like
all the characters in the film.

Speaker 3 (59:26):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (59:28):
Um, But anyway, that interview is really fun. He does
share one little story. He reflects fondly on working with Cosmatos,
but mentioned something. He has a story about Cosmatos saying like, hey,
you're on Canadian television. There's this Canadian critic who did
not give the movie a good review. I need you
to call him up and straighten him out on this.
And he's like, you know, that's just, that's not done.
He's like, that's, that was, that's just ridiculous because like

(59:50):
he said, even if I did that, like this guy
would never give me a good review about anything I
did for the rest of my career. So it was
kind of funny.

Speaker 3 (59:59):
That kind of matches other stories I've heard about Cosmato Sr.
Just the kind of guy who would make absurd requests
of people.

Speaker 2 (01:00:09):
All right. So that's our main street-level character. But there's
also a hardware salesman that pops up. He's played by
this guy Keith Knight, who lived 1956 through 2007. Canadian
actor whose credits include the pivotal early slasher film, 81's
My Bloody Valentine. And his other credits include 79's Meatballs
and 82's Class of 1984. And this movie is kind

(01:00:31):
of a poison slinger.

Speaker 1 (01:00:33):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:00:33):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:00:34):
Like which kind of poison you want to buy? And
then he explains how the poisons work for the plot.

Speaker 3 (01:00:39):
All right.

Speaker 2 (01:00:39):
Uh, and then finally getting into the, uh, into the
high rise, getting into the workplace, the office, we have
several key characters. Um, first of all, we have the,
the character Elliot Riverton, uh, this is played by, this
is the big boss. This is Bart's main boss played
by Canadian actor, Lawrence Dane, who lived 1937 through 2022.

(01:01:00):
We've talked about him before because he played Braden Keller
in 81 scanners. So he's the, this is the concept
security head who ends up secretly working for Daryl Revick.

Speaker 3 (01:01:13):
He's like hunting down scanners.

Speaker 2 (01:01:14):
Yeah. Yeah. He's a great, he plays a great suit,
you know, uh, and, and here he's a great suit. Uh, though,
not like a full-on villain or anything, but an imposing figure. Like,
he represents things in Bart's life that are high-stress, at least.

Speaker 3 (01:01:31):
Yeah. As we said earlier, none of the secondary characters
are really written with a lot of depth, but he,
but a lot of the actors in, like, the workplace
characters just kind of bring their own texture to the roles,
and so he brings a lot, Lawrence Dayne brings a
lot of that to this guy. There is a weird

(01:01:52):
mixture of fatherliness, but also coldness to this guy. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:01:58):
Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, Lawrence Dane, really good as always.
His other credits include Happy Birthday to Me, 79's, I mean,
77's Rituals, 89's Millennium, 95's Darkman 2, and 1998's Bride
of Chucky. All right. Other characters at work, we have
Laurie Wells. This is Bart's secretary, played by Jennifer Dale,

(01:02:19):
born 1956. Her other credits include the pilot episode of
the Robocop TV series, which is kind of a neat connection,
as well as David Cronenberg's 2024 film, The Shrouds. And
Schitt's Creek fans might recognize her as the character just
in one episode, Trish, the episode Rooms by the Hour,
in which she plays an escort agent who starts running

(01:02:40):
her business out of the Schitt's Creek Hotel. Nice. Let's see.
Then we have a couple of work rivals. We have
James Hall. played by Kenneth Welsh, who lived 1942 through 2022.
Canadian actor. We mentioned him in the past because he
was in Time Cop, so we discussed him in our
episode on Time Cop. He played Watson opposite Matt Frewer's

(01:03:04):
Sherlock in the early 2000s on some projects. And then
finally we have Mari Chaykin playing the key work antagonist,
Dan Errol. Chaykin lived 1949 through 2010. He was a
Canadian-American actor whose credits include 83's War Games, 1990's Dances
with Wolves, 92's My Cousin Vinny. He was also in Curtains,

(01:03:28):
also in Millennium, like a lot of Canadian actors at
the time. 85's DEFCON 4. And of special note to
MST3K fans, he played the villain or sub-villain Gondal in
1984's Overdrawn at the Memory Bank.

Speaker 3 (01:03:42):
Hmm, okay. He's not the main guy chasing Fingal around.

Speaker 2 (01:03:46):
He's a different guy. He's not the big guy who's
always saying, like, Fingal! He's Fingal's second-in-command. So I often
think of them in terms of Harkonnens, and he's like
the beast in this film.

Speaker 3 (01:04:01):
Yeah, Rabban or whatever.

Speaker 2 (01:04:03):
Yeah, the beast Rabban. Anyway, great, great actor. He doesn't
have a lot to do here, but you can tell
that he really seems to inject his own... his own
vibe into this character and makes it, uh, gives it
a little more interest on the screen.

Speaker 3 (01:04:17):
He's memorable, even though he's only got like three lines.
Cause he just hangs around kind of sliming up the
screen with his presence. And there's a one really funny
scene where he scolds a robot. Yeah. There's a robot
in this movie. It's not a sci-fi movie, but there's
just one random blink and you'll miss it. Robot that
comes out of this guy's office. And he's like, go

(01:04:38):
back where you came from.

Speaker 2 (01:04:39):
Yeah, I didn't have time to get into why this happened,
but I assume this is something that just came together
when they were filming it, and Cosmatos was like, I
love it, let's do it.

Speaker 3 (01:04:46):
Let's put the robot in the movie.

Speaker 2 (01:04:48):
Yeah. I mentioned the effects already, but I'll just say
that a lot of connections to various other Canadian productions
and Cronenberg productions. The rat effects in the film are
exceptional and gross, encompassing everything from, I believe, live rats
and a live opossum to uses of puppetry. And the

(01:05:09):
close-ups on the rat feet, these especially really got to me.
This made the rat just seem like an alien being,
for sure.

Speaker 3 (01:05:18):
They're greasy. They smear on the glass.

Speaker 2 (01:05:21):
Yeah, and they're almost kind of translucent. Yeah, weird stuff.
And the score here, the music in the film, is
by Kenneth Wanberg, who lived 1930 through 2022, American composer,
whose other scores include 84's The Philadelphia Experiment, But I
thought the score of Unknown Origin is just exceptionally good.
Just really solid throughout. Great emotional resonance. A great building

(01:05:47):
up of the tension. So very good stuff.

Speaker 3 (01:05:50):
The Vinegar Syndrome disc is funny because the menu for
this movie has just happy springtime, morning has broken kind
of music playing. And then when you start the movie
and then it gets dark. Oh, wow. OK, you want

(01:06:15):
to talk about the plot?

Speaker 2 (01:06:17):
Let's do it.

Speaker 3 (01:06:18):
So the movie opens on a shot of the main
house in the film, and I think we should talk
about the house for a minute because the setting is
very important. It's one of those movies where the setting
is sort of the main character on the outside. It
is a gorgeous antique brownstone with a turret corner and
this carved stone pediment over the door. It's a beautiful

(01:06:39):
old house bordered by a graystone building on the right
and then this wide empty alleyway to the left. In
the movie, they say that this is in the Lower
East Side of Manhattan, but the actual location is on
Rue Drummond in Montreal. I believe the building is still there,
mostly unaltered, or at least it was at the time

(01:07:01):
the documentary feature that I watched was made. So it
looks mostly the same now. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:07:06):
You can look this up. Listeners, as always, respect the
people who live and or work in historic film locations,
but we would love to hear from anyone who has
actually sought out this building and can give us a
field report.

Speaker 3 (01:07:16):
Yeah. So the elegant old world exterior of this brownstone
is a hilarious contrast to the inside, which looks like
the house Drake lives in in Warriors of the Year 2072.
It's trendy 80s decor to the max.

Speaker 2 (01:07:30):
You've got.

Speaker 3 (01:07:35):
Interior partitions made of glass bricks. You've got potted palm
trees and spike plants everywhere. A mirror tiled wall behind
the bed in the master bedroom and then white walls
with pink blinds. In the kitchen, you've got white laminate
countertops with black appliances, like shiny black. There's this big

(01:07:57):
black dishwasher that looks like Knight Rider's car. In the bedroom,
there's this huge boxy tube TV with rabbit ears on
a round wicker table in the corner. I'm not an
interior design expert, but this just looks like a parody
of 80s decor decisions.

Speaker 2 (01:08:15):
Yeah, I mean, I really liked it. I mean, it
does look like the consumerist American dream at the time,
and I think it's supposed to. And, you know, perfect
for a family that is presented as pretty much the
American dream, again, at the time. But yeah, everything is
just super organized and tidy. He is completely in control
of his environment. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:08:35):
So in the opening scene, we see the three members
of the family getting ready in the morning. Bart and
Meg are getting dressed for the day, discussing their plans.
And the situation at the outset of the movie is
that Meg's father, who is super rich, kind of a
creature of old money, has invited the family to come
to his resort home in Vermont for a week of

(01:08:58):
skiing and indoor tennis. and things like that. Meg wants
to go. Bart says he can't go. It's the worst
possible time. A big opportunity is coming up for him
at work. Bart is some kind of banking and finance executive.
And he believes that the big boss is about to
give him an assignment, which, if he handles well, will

(01:09:18):
earn him a big raise and a seat on the board.
And there is some tension in this situation. Bart accuses
Meg of just hopping to any time her father suggests anything.
There's obviously money-related tension in this family. My read is
that Meg's family is old money and Bart is new money.

(01:09:40):
Like he doesn't necessarily come from a rich family, but
he earned his way up in this corporate job. And
so Bart kind of has a chip on his shoulder
about the fact that he has had to, to earn,
to work his way up. Uh, and he has paid
for the family's house and fancy lifestyle. All the while
Meg has always been like, well, we could just ask
my dad for the money. He'd give it to us.

(01:10:02):
And Bart has never allowed this. So definitely rich people
problems as presented, uh, But I think if you scale
down the amount of money in question, it's kind of
it's a relatable problem. There can be like tension in
a family at the intersection of money, pride and feelings
about deservingness.

Speaker 2 (01:10:21):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:10:21):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:10:22):
And in those examples, it may be a lot more
complex and more ins and outs. And this version that
we have in the movie is also just maybe a
little easier to relate.

Speaker 3 (01:10:30):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:10:32):
And.

Speaker 3 (01:10:32):
The pride, by the way, is not just financial. It's
going to come up also with reference to renovations that
Bart did on their home with his own hands. He says,
I did this with my own hands. So he is
not just the kind of business executive who hires a contractor.
He mentioned several things around the house that he did himself.

(01:10:52):
And this later seems wrapped up in how obsessed he
becomes with defending his home from the intruder. Like, I
did these hardwood floors myself.

Speaker 2 (01:11:01):
Yeah, and I think a lot of this comes back
again to that idea of control and the illusion of
control and the more things like this. Like if you're
doing your own tile work, is it really better than
it would be if it was professionally installed? Maybe, maybe not.
I don't know. He seems to have done a great
job here. But by directly doing it, like he's getting
to have one more thing in his life that he

(01:11:22):
has direct, complete, foreseeable control over.

Speaker 3 (01:11:26):
Yeah. So the way this is going to work out
is Meg will take their son Peter to Vermont for
the week and they're going to leave Bart alone in
the house so he can focus on this big project
at work. And the scene isn't all tension. It's mostly
not nice. Like there's flirtiness between them and humor, a
lot of giggling and smooching. So they're shown to have

(01:11:46):
a very nice, idyllic family life. Meanwhile, in the kitchen, Peter,
their young son, is having cereal. He's not really eating it.
What he's doing is pouring out the entire box of
Fruity Pebbles and stuff into multiple different bowls and spilling
it all over the counter and the floor, trying to
find the toy that was promised on the box. And

(01:12:09):
I think this is supposed to be a capsule of
the rest of the story. He's making a huge mess
and being wasteful to get the prize.

Speaker 2 (01:12:16):
Yeah, that was very much my read as well. While
also just being very true to life about how kids
would interact with cereal boxes that had prizes inside.

Speaker 3 (01:12:24):
Yeah. So when Bart comes into the kitchen, he's a
little annoyed at the mess, but obviously he's a softie
when it comes to his kid and he ends up
digging the toy spaceship out of the box for him.
A lot of little moments of Bart fussing over the
condition of the house, like he stops to straighten a
picture frame and he scolds Peter for disturbing the rug

(01:12:45):
in the foyer.

Speaker 2 (01:12:46):
And Yeah, and the screenwriter points out that he kind
of based some of this, I think, on his own,
like his stepfather, I think. And so I think Bart
is supposed to be presented maybe as a bit too
much of a stickler in this. But also, I mean,
as a parent, I definitely think, yes, straighten that rug.
You just messed up that rug. The struggle here is real.
Straighten the rug, close the shower curtain. You know what

(01:13:08):
to do. Why does it keep not getting done?

Speaker 3 (01:13:10):
Because it's easier not to.

Speaker 2 (01:13:13):
It's just easier not to. Kids are going to be kids, yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:13:16):
So Meg and Peter pack up and get into the
car and head to Vermont. So multiple times I noticed
we see Peter sitting in the driver's seat of a car,
like leaning on the horn and pretending to drive. I
didn't know if that was supposed to mean something. But
every time we see Peter and a car in the
same shot, he's pretending to drive the car.

Speaker 2 (01:13:35):
Yeah, I don't know. I just I interpret it as
just kid behavior. But you could maybe apply the whole
control narrative to that as well.

Speaker 1 (01:13:41):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:13:42):
Uh, Meg is all decked out in like luxurious furs
and she gives, she gives Bart for a drive, a
multi cross state drive. You're putting the furs on. Um, anyway, she,
she warns him before she leaves. She gives him some
smooches and then she warns him. Don't sit around the house,
driving yourself crazy while we're gone.

Speaker 2 (01:14:03):
No chance of that happening.

Speaker 3 (01:14:05):
So Bart goes back in the house. He makes himself
some breakfast. And while he is spreading butter on his toast,
we see an almost in this like mirror like back
of the stovetop, the reflection of a rat shaped shadow
scampering across the kitchen. Bart does not see it. And
then as he leaves for work with his briefcase, we

(01:14:26):
watch a point of view shot out of the window.
Somebody is watching him, someone or something.

Speaker 2 (01:14:32):
Yeah, I like how we're introduced to the rat at
first because this is very true to life. Like when
you do glimpse rats, unless it's a very bold rat,
it is going to be one of these kind of
like baseboard running sort of scenarios. A rat or a
mouse of some sort, you know? So it makes sense
that he wouldn't see it and we would barely see it. But,
you know, we've lived alongside rodents long enough. We were

(01:14:55):
wired to notice that. Now, I don't know about this
shot of presumably the rat looking out through the windows
because this feels like man height. So I don't really
know how to interpret this.

Speaker 3 (01:15:06):
So once Bart gets to the office, we follow him
through some hard-nosed business babble and executive politics. He's been
angling to get put in charge of this big upcoming merger.
But the boss, the guy named Elliot Riverton, is instead
handing that account to Bart's rival, James Hall. And he's
giving Bart a different assignment that has to do with

(01:15:28):
reorganizing bank branches in California. Ultimately, this isn't going to
matter a lot. But he's getting a different assignment than
he wanted. And he's not happy about this because he says,
mergers are my strong suit. You know, I don't know
anything about this other stuff. And Bart laments the office politics.
He says to his assistant, Lori, this isn't a trust company.

(01:15:49):
It's the court of Louis XIV. And Laurie is going
to become a fairly significant character. She's not just hanging
out bringing Bart coffee. She's basically running things around here.
And she's strategizing with Bart about his maneuvers in trying
to climb the corporate ladder. Bart at one point makes

(01:16:09):
a not work appropriate comment about how her blouse looks
very pretty. Uh, which is funny because I was flagging
the blouses looking kind of weird for an office. Maybe
the style was different in the eighties, but it's this
like super frilly sheer white thing with puffy sleeves. Uh,
it looks like, like bed curtains from a Victorian mansion.

Speaker 2 (01:16:28):
Yeah, it does look a bit much, but yeah, to your,
to your point, maybe it was acceptable in the eighties.

Speaker 1 (01:16:34):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:16:34):
Uh, anyway, uh, From that comment, I was immediately like,
oh no, is this boss going to end up pursuing
an inappropriate relationship with Laurie while his wife is out
of town? I guess we'll find out. The signs are
kind of pointing yes. Though it doesn't end up going
the way you might expect, basically, because later she comes
over and there is like a kiss, but he's too

(01:16:55):
haunted by rats to take it any further.

Speaker 2 (01:16:58):
Yeah, he is not taking on additional romances at that
point in the movie.

Speaker 3 (01:17:04):
Um, so anyway, once Bart and the boss Riverton finally
see each other, Riverton explains that he really needs Bart
on this other bank branch assignment. Uh, you know, it's
because you are my number one guy. Uh, he says,
I need a hands-on guy, Bart. Uh, but it's a
fast timetable. He needs it all worked out in two weeks.

(01:17:25):
So Bart is going to have to go into overdrive.
He also mentions that he's going to need Bart to
come to an important dinner party later this week with
the Los Angeles branch manager. So don't rehearse any nauseating
stories about rats and disease for this party. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:17:41):
I love how everything is set up at this point.
Cause you get, you got to look at Bart as like,
he's not, he's a guy on the rise within his industry,
but he's also, you can think of him, you know,
in kind of getting into the midlife anxiety aspect of
it all. Like he is, A guy that may be
in his prime earning years, perhaps. He's got where he

(01:18:01):
is at by saying yes to pretty much everything that's
presented to him work-wise. And at this point, he's probably
severely overextended. So I think that's all important to note.
And I think the film does a good job of
presenting it. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:18:17):
So later that night, back at the house, Bart is
working at his desk. He hears a sound in the house.
He picks up a statuette and holds it like a club.
Is it a miniature bronze Statue of Liberty? I think maybe.

Speaker 2 (01:18:29):
I guess I think it was already on the lookout
for rats here, so I didn't notice.

Speaker 3 (01:18:32):
He starts creeping around looking for the source of the noise.
And here we are treated to another huge rat shadow
looming over Peter Weller in a way that he can't see.
It's like behind him. But it's such a big shadow.
It's like the rat must be right next to the
light bulb.

Speaker 2 (01:18:48):
I don't know. you know it's not only visually that
the rat is going to be so like greatly exaggerated
eventually this rat is going to start making noises and
these are the most hellacious sounds a movie rat has
surely ever made a giant rat or not uh it
is It feels more like it's definitely leaning into the
monstrous and maybe even the psychological.

Speaker 3 (01:19:10):
I multiple times had to turn down the volume on
this movie while I was making notes on it. Cause
just like the squealing screeching, I was afraid it was
going to like wake up my daughter and give her nightmares. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:19:21):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:19:21):
It is. It is horrific.

Speaker 3 (01:19:23):
Yeah. So anyway, Peter Weller goes into the kitchen. He's
stalking around with this club and eventually he gets there
and the kitchen is flooded. There's water all over the floor.
Water is gushing out of the Knight Rider dishwasher. So like,
oh boy, this is all I need.

Speaker 2 (01:19:41):
Again, this is not escapist horror. This is very confrontational.
Like if you've ever had dishwasher woes, this cuts deep.

Speaker 3 (01:19:48):
In general, water gushing out onto your floor and just
continuing to flow is a very bad feeling in there.
So anyway, that night while Weller is asleep, we get
our first taste of rat cam. So we'll get this
many times in the film. Flashes of extreme rat close-ups,
like a beady eye and a rat claw leaving this

(01:20:11):
greasy streak on a piece of glass. Rat point of
view shots is the creature ambles through a sewer pipe
or down a tunnel that it has chewed behind the drywall.
And we also get action shots of rat damage, like
knocking over picture frames, breaking stuff, getting it filthy, stuff
like that.

Speaker 2 (01:20:30):
Smearing things.

Speaker 3 (01:20:31):
Yeah. Smearing.

Speaker 1 (01:20:32):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:20:33):
So in the next scene, we're going to meet a
major secondary character, Cleet. This is Louis Delgrande. Uh, cleat
is again, the superintendent of the building next door. And
he comes over to help Bart with the dishwasher problem
because his regular plumber can't get there until the following week. Um,
cleat again is sort of the archetype of the like
post Vietnam survivalist. We're going to learn that he's full

(01:20:56):
of rat facts and he thinks of rats as a
kind of demonic force. First, he argues with Bart about
the cause of the leak because Bart's like, no, it
can't be the dishwasher. It's brand new. Top of the line.
I just installed it. But Cleet shows him a chewed
up cable or hose and he asks, you got any mice?
And Bart says very confidently, no mice here. Cleet says,

(01:21:20):
maybe it's a rat. And Bart says, no mice, no
rat in this house. But Cleet explains that he obviously
does have a rat and that exterminators are for old ladies.
They're for people who are afraid of getting their hands dirty.
And Bart is he's clearly like being baited. He's like,
I'm not afraid of getting my hands dirty. I renovated

(01:21:40):
this place myself. So Cleet is tempting Bart into this
mad rat quest by sort of implying questions about his manhood.
And he offers advice. He says, you've got to put
out traps, but not regular traps, because what you have
here is an intelligent rat. This kind of rat is
just going to snatch the food out of the trap

(01:22:02):
and then run around here creating general havoc. And then
this leads to comments out of nowhere about how the
rat should be in the Bronx. Feels like dialogue from 1990,
the Bronx Warriors.

Speaker 2 (01:22:13):
Yeah. I mean, I guess this matches up with the
state of the Bronx at the time where it was
in a great deal of disrepair. It's like, this is
the kind of place where rats are and should be
running around. Not the rest of the boroughs, but I mean,
they're everywhere.

Speaker 3 (01:22:26):
I'm rich. I can't have rats.

Speaker 2 (01:22:27):
Yeah. I mean, that is part of the texture that
the film is exploring, right?

Speaker 3 (01:22:33):
Totally, yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:22:34):
You know, it's like I... I have a certain amount
of money. I have a certain amount of control over
my life. This is not something that should be part
of the picture, and yet it shows up anyway. And again,
I think we can all relate to that, sometimes in
the form of an actual rodent, but other times it
could be anything else. It could be an illness. It
could be some other sort of scenario we have no
control over, and then we have to confront something of

(01:22:56):
unknown origin.

Speaker 3 (01:22:57):
Yeah. So the next day, Peter Weller puts out traps.
We see a scene of him with a knife chopping
up a block of cheese to bake the trap.

Speaker 2 (01:23:05):
Oh, and he's so particular. He's not going halfway on this.
He's getting very precise cuts of what seems like very
good cheese. This is not moldy stuff from the bin.
This is the good stuff.

Speaker 3 (01:23:17):
He later tells Louis Delgrande that he found the sharpest
cheddar he could find. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:23:24):
Yeah, only the bet. Like this is the, he applied
the same logic to like picking up the dishwasher. It's like,
I'm going to solve this problem effectively and get the
best stuff, best traps, best cheese.

Speaker 3 (01:23:35):
So we get a peak. Meanwhile, what's happening in Vermont
with the rest of the family, uh, they're at this
resort surrounded with snow and Meg, Peter and grandpa are
playing in the heated pool. Uh, Meg gets on the
phone with Bart and they're also kind of strategizing about
his career. Bart is obviously feeling discouraged. He thinks this
other guy, his rival, Hall, is going to outmaneuver him.

(01:23:58):
And he opines that working hard does not guarantee anything.
Meg is generally just supportive and encouraging and gives him
some advice. But we see in the scene also that
Bart is getting significantly distracted from work, thinking about this rat.
Lori has to keep reminding him of things. So he's
going into a meeting with somebody and she's like, you've

(01:24:19):
got this meeting coming up. And he's like, what's this
dork's name? And she has to tell him.

Speaker 2 (01:24:24):
Now, have we already, is it in the previous meeting
with Cleet where he tells them, he has his explanation
where it's like, you only think about the rat like 20%
of your day.

Speaker 3 (01:24:35):
Oh, that's coming up.

Speaker 2 (01:24:36):
That's coming up. But you're right. Yeah, that's a good point.
Like the rat's thinking about you all the time. And
we're already beginning to see like the percentage of time
he's devoting to rat think. This may be a bit much. Also,
this scene where he's on the phone, if it's not
this scene, it's another scene where he's on the phone
in his office, which is, you know, on the upper

(01:24:56):
floors of some sort of supposed to be a Manhattan
high rise and, you know, skyscraper. And it's shot in
such a way like it's shot at an angle from
the ceiling. So and he's and he's seated at his
desk close to the window. So there's this wonderful sense
of there being like a drop beneath him, like as

(01:25:16):
if he is on the ledge of that building, as
if there is a risk of plummeting. And I just
thought it was just such a well-composed shot that ties
into the theme of the picture.

Speaker 3 (01:25:27):
That's a good note. You're right. So later that night,
Bart comes home. He checks the traps. No luck. Rat
hasn't touched anything. And at first he thinks maybe there
is no rat. And Cleet's just running me up a tree.

(01:25:47):
You know, there's nothing going on here. But then we
cut immediately to the next morning where Bart is pulling
a slice of white bread out of the bread bag
on the counter. And there's this long, straight black hair
on it. He's like, what is this? And then he
presses the bread to his lips and nose and smells it.
I was like, what? Is he turning to smell for

(01:26:08):
rat urine on the bread?

Speaker 2 (01:26:10):
Yeah, I mean, we didn't get enough really to go
on here, but I like kind of the idea that
maybe this hair is not of rat origin, you know,
but it's like he's at the point now where he's
overthinking all of this. Like I found, I can't explain
this hair, could be a rat. I don't know what
happened here, could be the rat.

Speaker 3 (01:26:27):
So he checks the traps again after this, and now,
totally different story. The traps are not only triggered, they're destroyed,
but there's no rat in them. So bait gone, no rat,
springs and hardware all twisted, wooden base chewed to pieces.
So not only did the traps fail to kill the rat,
the rat killed the traps.

Speaker 2 (01:26:49):
It's true.

Speaker 3 (01:26:49):
Time to have another check-in with Cleet. So Bart brings
this grocery bag full of chewed-up traps to Cleet's weird
basement workshop. Cleet reacts by insulting the traps. He's like,
who gave you these, your grandma? According to Cleet, these
traps are no good. He's like, you've got to get
yourself the real deal traps, the kind with steel jaws

(01:27:12):
that look like a shark's mouth.

Speaker 2 (01:27:14):
I believe these are called T-Rex traps nowadays. And they are,
in fact, a real technology for killing rodents. But the
ones the version that we see in the film, I
don't know if this is accurate to what they had
in the 80s, but they look medieval. They look like
like something like like the T-Rex traps that I see today,
like transported into some sort of medieval torture technology.

Speaker 3 (01:27:37):
Yeah, they kind of look like something made by Dr. Claw. Yeah. Yeah.
So Cleet in this scene explains that there are exactly
five ways to kill a rat. Only five. Do you
want to know what they are?

Speaker 2 (01:27:48):
Yeah, I think you left one out, but let's go
with it.

Speaker 3 (01:27:51):
He says, you trap them, you poison them, you knock
them on the head, you gas them, or you shoot them. Okay.

Speaker 2 (01:27:59):
He seems very sure of it. And one thing I
love is that, so he hands Cleet this trap that's
been destroyed by the rat, chewed up by the rat.
Cleet almost immediately after he sets this down, grabs a
grape out of a fruit bowl on his desk, eats it,
Then opens up his own refrigerator, gets an apple out,
starts eating that. No hand washing or anything. I don't know.

(01:28:23):
I just loved it. It was such a great choice.

Speaker 3 (01:28:25):
Yeah, really good. And later in the scene, he's like
offering fruit to Peter Weller, too. He's like, you want
a pear?

Speaker 2 (01:28:32):
Here. Yeah, I think maybe there is a sense of like,
Cleet is a man of the street. Like he is
in the trenches with the rats. he is a part
of the world that um that bart feels like he
has like ascended out of and maybe has a lot
also a lot of anxieties about like leaving behind that
kind of do it yourself um you know mentality and

(01:28:53):
getting into this sort of uh this different realm of
society so i think there's a lot of texture here
as well.

Speaker 3 (01:28:59):
This leads into the part where Cleet gives the speech
about how the rat is a survivor. He tells the
story about how when he was in the army, he
was present for nuclear weapons testing at this island in
the Pacific. And he talks about how the blast on
this island killed everything, every life form down to the amoebas,

(01:29:20):
except rats. They survived. I went digging around on this.
From what I read, this is not exactly true as
stated for Pacific Island tests that killed every other life
form but rats, but it is true. It's sort of
directionally true. It's true that in many Pacific Islands, nuclear

(01:29:41):
testing did kill a lot of the native wildlife, but
rats survived in incredibly harsh conditions.

Speaker 2 (01:29:48):
Yeah, so maybe not factually correct, but still spiritually correct.
in that rats are great survivors, and ultimately, like, survivors
in their lineage of mass extinction events, you know? Like,
they are long-term survivors. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:30:01):
There's also a weird aside in this scene where Cleet
starts commenting on, like, the legs of women who go
walking by the sidewalk-level window looking out from the basement.

Speaker 2 (01:30:12):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:30:13):
I think it's just something about, like, this guy's a
little off.

Speaker 2 (01:30:16):
He's a little off, but also he's street-level. He's beneath
the street, even. I don't know. He's seeing the world
like a rat in a way, you know, like he's
seeing the lower leg.

Speaker 3 (01:30:25):
But then he snaps back to the subject with that
comment you mentioned earlier. So he's putting new perspective on
this for Bart. He's like, you spend like 20% of
your time thinking about the rat. The rat spends 100%
of its time thinking about you, figuring out ways to
outsmart you. He says, cause he's a rat. He's got
nothing better to do. You want a pair?

Speaker 2 (01:30:47):
So it becomes clear that Bart needs to up those numbers.
He needs to increase that percentage. And that's basically what
we see. More and more of his day, more and
more of his thoughts are put into the war against
the rat.

Speaker 3 (01:30:59):
I think maybe, but maybe Cleet's lack of sanitation here,
his lack of hygiene with respect to rat-contaminated objects, could
be contributing to his ability to think like a rat.
Maybe he's consuming a bit of the rat's microbiome here
and that's contributing to his helping him see from the

(01:31:21):
rat's perspective. What do you think?

Speaker 2 (01:31:23):
Maybe, but maybe also the thing they don't, this is
just me going off on it here, but maybe Bart
is already in a situation where, you know, he doesn't
have fruit setting out right now. That fruit's going in
the fridge.

Speaker 3 (01:31:34):
Right.

Speaker 2 (01:31:34):
And then he's washing it before he eats it, you know,
on top of anything else. Cleet, Cleet's got his rat
problem under control. There are no rats around here. Rat
comes around here, he kills it. He stabs it, drowns it,
whatever the five things are. Electric chair, yeah. So it's
like he can leave fruit out because he's in control.

Speaker 3 (01:31:53):
That's a very good observation. I think that must be true.
I was just thinking about Cleet's other, his more extreme
rat facts. And there's a scene later where Cleet explains
that rats go right for your private parts, he says.
He says they want to eat the soft parts off
of human bodies, meaning genitals and then eyes. He says

(01:32:14):
they love eyes. And he says they eat straight through
to your brain from the eyes. But anyway, long story short,
the connection I suddenly thought of was eyes to grapes. Maybe.
There you go. Something there.

Speaker 2 (01:32:28):
Yeah, could be.

Speaker 3 (01:32:29):
I don't know what the connection is. It just seems
like grapes are like eyes, aren't they?

Speaker 2 (01:32:33):
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I know. I hear what you're laying down. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:32:36):
Okay. So Bart, uh, Bart begins to take increasing absences
from work to think about the rat. Uh, he ducks
out for an early lunch. He comes home, finds his
mail and magazines all chewed up, uh, and that does it.
So now he puts in these grizzly traps, the T-Rex traps. Uh,
he creeps around with a tray of traps in his
child's room, talking to the stuffed animals about where the

(01:32:59):
best kill spot is. And he hides one of these
horrible traps behind the child's bed. There's a scene of
him testing the traps on a Superman doll where he
chops Superman's head off.

Speaker 2 (01:33:10):
Yeah, this is all great stuff because it's like he
is bringing this kind of violence, even it's not direct violence,
but it's like violent energy into these sort of like
safe spaces of the home, these sacred spaces that have
already been invaded by the rat. So there's this weird

(01:33:30):
like contamination coming in from both ways. He is fighting
the monster of contamination, but also becoming a monster of
contamination himself.

Speaker 3 (01:33:38):
After this, Bart starts really getting into rat research. We
see him at the library reading articles and books about rats,
leafing through these big blow-up photographs of people who had
suffered rat bites. And he's looking at corpses. They got
their faces eaten off by rats.

Speaker 2 (01:33:55):
Yeah, this research segment is a lot to watch. This
is pretty disturbing stuff.

Speaker 3 (01:34:01):
By the way, from that featurette, they think this was
probably shot at the Red Path Library at McGill University.
So any McGill University students, if you want to find
this location, if it's still standing, I'd be curious about that.
In this scene, we see the title of the film.
Bart is reviewing microfilm slides about rats on a machine.

(01:34:24):
And one glowing slide comes up with the picture of
a rat, species name, and it says rat of unknown origin.
I was like, is this suggesting no one knows where
rats came from? As in like they might be from
outer space?

Speaker 2 (01:34:39):
I mean, in a film like this, it does kind
of imply that. And I think that's one of the
confusing things about the title is it maybe makes it
sound like it's spacey. I think this is referring to
different disagreements about like the actual, like where in the
world the most common forms of rat and the most
expansive species of rats originated from. you know, in their

(01:35:00):
global spread since that time.

Speaker 3 (01:35:03):
Okay.

Speaker 2 (01:35:04):
So of unknown precise origin might be a better way
of putting it.

Speaker 3 (01:35:07):
He also is just looking at a lot of stuff
about rats and disease. It's a, it's a grim, it's
a grim viewing.

Speaker 2 (01:35:13):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:35:13):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:35:14):
He is getting deeper and deeper. He's just freaking himself out.
It's not a, not a good vibe.

Speaker 3 (01:35:21):
So let's skip ahead to the dinner party, right? That's
where we're headed next. So The dinner party scene where
the boss is trying to hold a tasteful, impressive dinner
for these associates, and Bart absolutely makes it weird by
cornering the branch manager at his end of the table,
unleashing this rat speech, which is a frightening, bizarre philippic

(01:35:45):
about the evils of rats and condemning humans that do
not realize how awful rats are and humans that don't
deal with them according to their nature. Uh, and I
love how it starts by the boss throwing him a
question about tennis and Bart is like, nah, I'm not
going to hit that serve back. I'm going to talk

(01:36:06):
about rats and death.

Speaker 2 (01:36:07):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:36:08):
Uh, this speech makes a bunch of claims, uh, which
I looked up some of them. They're of mixed credibility.
Like he talks about how rats destroy 20% of all
the grain produced worldwide. I don't think that's true. might
be closer to true if you change rats to rodents
generally and you change and and you say um at

(01:36:32):
like all stages of the process like consume destroy or
contaminate you might be getting a little bit closer to
the truth there uh he talks about rats being responsible
for the spread of the black death this i think
used to be thought but is now disputed it seems
now uh A lot of researchers think it more likely
that human lice and fleas did most of the spreading

(01:36:55):
of the plague bacterium. Of course, rat fleas played a
role as like a reservoir of the disease. And rats
absolutely do spread some diseases. But it seems that plague,
the historical Black Death in particular, probably was not mostly
spread by rats. He says rats can eat through lead

(01:37:16):
and concrete. Uh, and he's talking about rats entering buildings
through a toilet, uh.

Speaker 2 (01:37:23):
And leaving the same way.

Speaker 3 (01:37:24):
Right.

Speaker 2 (01:37:24):
Or you can like, yeah, go in and out.

Speaker 3 (01:37:27):
Yeah. Enter and leave through the toilet. Uh, he talks
about eating rats. He says they taste like stringy chicken. Uh,
this meanwhile, like Mari chicken is there gnawing on a
bone and he gets really mad at the idea of
religions that venerate rats or have rat gods. Bart rules
this disgusting. I really wish I could do this at

(01:37:47):
a CEO dinner party. Just like ruin the party. Wouldn't
that be funny?

Speaker 2 (01:37:51):
I mean, you can. We just got to get invited.
That's the thing.

Speaker 3 (01:37:55):
Anyway, yeah, I have so many great like bot fly
things to say at dinner. So for the rest of
the movie, I guess to move into more summary mode,
Bart is going to continue to struggle with this rat,

(01:38:17):
contend with it. It's going to become increasingly desperate. He's
trying more and more drastic measures, exterminators, poison, one-on-one armed combat.
A new character, Parallel to cleat comes on the scene
and as far as i could tell unnamed salesman running
a store that looks kind of like a mix between
a hardware store and an army surplus.

Speaker 2 (01:38:38):
Yeah kind of a i mean you know like a
basically like a an actual authentic new york hardware store
you know it's kind of like bodega style stores where
they have just a bunch of hardware stuff in the
Like I never go into these because I am not
a New Yorker. If I'm in New York, I'm definitely
a tourist. I don't need anything in there, but it's
always charming to see these places. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:38:58):
And I like this character too, though, reflecting on it
the second time I watched, I kind of feel like
they could have done to either make this character more
distinct from Cleet or just make his scenes into additional
scenes with Cleet. Because as it is, this guy is
very similar to Cleet.

Speaker 2 (01:39:15):
And I'm all for more Cleet.

Speaker 3 (01:39:17):
Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2 (01:39:18):
He's so tremendous. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:39:20):
Um, yeah, he's like just quite, quite similar vibes. He's
a weird squirrely survivalist type with strong negative opinions about
rats and extreme views on how to kill them. So
he's kind of cleat, but even more so. Yeah. Uh,
so in one scene, he sells Bart a poison that
he explains will give the rat a desperate, unnaturally urgent

(01:39:41):
sense of thirst and the rat will bolt for whatever
water it can find. So, uh, uh, He tells Bart
he has to cut off every bit of access to water,
nail down the toilet lids, and then put this stuff out.
The rat's going to eat it and then rush down
to the sewer, drink the water there until it swells
up like a balloon and pops. Pretty nasty pitch. This

(01:40:04):
does not work.

Speaker 2 (01:40:06):
Also, the details, the grisly details are not particularly important.
These are not plot relevant, really.

Speaker 3 (01:40:11):
Yeah, nothing really happens with that. It's just interesting that
he goes through the whole description. Somewhere in here we
get the toilet bowl surprise scene where Bart wakes up
at night to go pee and then he opens the
toilet lid and the rat's just in there having a
little bit of toilet time for itself.

Speaker 2 (01:40:26):
Thankfully, I mean, it is a standing pee. So it's
maybe not as terrifying as it could have been. But
this resonated with me because I think as I mentioned before,
I saw a trailer for the movie Slugs when I
was a kid in which not rodents, but like garden
slugs are crawling over a toilet. And I think it's
implied there's a scene in which someone is attacked on

(01:40:47):
the toilet by slugs. And this messed me up as
a kid. And for a while, I was like, I
was always afraid that there might be a slug on
or in the toilet.

Speaker 3 (01:40:55):
Toilet attacks are not fun to imagine. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:40:58):
Don't get me started on ghoulies.

Speaker 3 (01:41:00):
Yeah. So Bart, in the second half of the movie,
starts talking to the rat when he's alone in the house.
This leads to one of the funniest scenes in the movie,
which is when Bart tries to uh, intimidate the rat
by being like, Hey, I'm not scared of you. I've
tried marijuana.

Speaker 2 (01:41:18):
Yeah. He's like, I've been to college. You don't know
who you're messing with. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:41:21):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:41:23):
Uh, there is a scene where, uh, Bart brings his
assistant Lori home with him one night after work. Uh,
or it's just like, she has to come inside to
get something, but then, uh, she's like, Hey, you know,
you've been visibly distressed about something and she's trying to
figure out what's wrong with him. They have a con
a conversation about these old brownstone houses. Uh, she's like, Ooh,

(01:41:48):
you know, I want to see how you did the
decor upstairs. And he's like, Oh no, no. But then
he starts musing about difficulties in his marriage. And I'm like, ah,
don't do this, buddy. Uh, he makes a move to
kiss her, but it never goes anywhere because of rat.
Like he's preoccupied with rat. And then the rat makes
a sound in the middle of the kiss, like as

(01:42:08):
if it's intentionally trying to intervene. Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:42:13):
So at this point, he's probably up to like, I think, 60%
rat time on his brain.

Speaker 3 (01:42:19):
So she leaves and then he recruits a cat. He
finds a feral cat outside, brings it into the house,
starts kissing it and like speaking lovingly to the cat.
He gives it old oysters.

Speaker 2 (01:42:31):
I'm going to go ahead and say definitely not a
feral cat.

Speaker 3 (01:42:33):
It's a very clean, healthy looking cat.

Speaker 2 (01:42:36):
If you can pick it up, it's probably not feral. Um,
but he has obtained it and maybe that makes it
more horrifying. Like he thinks he got a feral cat,
but he just straight up stole somebody's cat.

Speaker 3 (01:42:46):
Yeah. Uh, the cat fails to kill the rat. In fact,
the rat kills the cat. Bart finds the cat dead
on top of the refrigerator, dripping blood into his milk.
Very cool.

Speaker 2 (01:42:57):
But yeah, this is definitely the scene where he's, he's realizing, okay,
maybe I can't solve this myself. I've got to bring
in expertise. I've got to bring in a cat or,
and you know, or the exterminators ends up being a,
an option he explores. Um, but when these fail like that, just,
I think we have this experience. Everyone has this experience
as well. You know, like you think you have control
over something and you think, okay, the way I actually

(01:43:18):
have control over this is by going to experts. And yes,
that is in general the way to go. But then
if that doesn't 100% solve a problem, you can have
that feeling where it just like kind of collapses back
on you. And you just feel like you have super
no control over everything. Like not only can you not
solve it, but you can't pay somebody to just solve

(01:43:38):
it for you.

Speaker 3 (01:43:39):
Totally. Yeah. Um, and, and Bart's there. I mean, he,
he tries to hire exterminators, but nobody, everybody's booked. Nobody
will come. There's another scene later where he, he gets
an exterminator to come out to the house. He leaves
a checkout for them, but when they get there, they
leave because there's no check because the rat chewed it up.

Speaker 2 (01:44:00):
That was, yeah. I love that detail. That's rat smart.

Speaker 1 (01:44:04):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:44:05):
Smart rats. Now, there end up being a bunch of
basement confrontations. Bart goes into the creepy basement boiler room
and finds a litter of rat pups down there. He
discovers that the rat is a female, which the hardware
store guy warned him about. He's like, the females are
twice as bad. And as he is carrying the box

(01:44:27):
of pups off somewhere, the mother rat scares him and
he accidentally drops them and they fall through a grate
in the floor. We never see what happened to them.
We assume their fate is not good. And in like
rage and agony, the mother rat chases Bart out of
the basement until he slams and bolts the boiler room
door behind him. Interesting visual symbol that pops up in

(01:44:49):
the basement. There's a scale model of their house down there.
which i think they were using during renovations for something
um and at one point bart sticks his hand into
the house and it like it gets caught in a
rat trap that yeah because he placed one there earlier
i think and then he's like going to check it
to reload it and it's one of it's just an
awful scene to watch because you know it's going to

(01:45:11):
happen um and it does happen yeah i i I
was going to say, I also thought that these scenes
in the cellar were interesting after watching that bit with
the screenwriter who pointed out that originally, I guess in
the original script and maybe in the original book, Bart
was too afraid to go into the cellar. And this
is one of the things that they worked out, I

(01:45:32):
think maybe worked out with Peter Weller, where they were like,
what if he's bolder? What if he's not afraid to
go in the cellar? And I think that, yeah, it's
hard to imagine this film if Bart had been less
willing to take the fight down there.

Speaker 2 (01:45:48):
Yeah, totally.

Speaker 3 (01:45:51):
After he gets his hand caught in the trap, by
the way, this is the scene where he's sitting in
the bathtub drinking J & B out of the bottle. Yeah, yeah.
A lot of alcohol consumption in this movie. Did you
notice that Bart is constantly drinking liquor and it's not
addressed by any of the characters? I don't know if
this is just supposed to be normal part of i

(01:46:12):
don't know new york executive life at the time or
if this is like we're supposed to see like bart
has a problem here.

Speaker 2 (01:46:18):
Yeah i mean i think there's definitely a sense of
like self-medicating uh you know in in just a like
the normal sense or the more conventional sense but then
of course he is actually like using the liquor i
think on his wounds from the rat yeah that's.

Speaker 3 (01:46:31):
True Uh, okay. So we see Bart descending further and
further into insanity. There's the scene where he's like bashing
holes on the ceiling with a copy of Moby Dick
trying to get the rat. Amazing.

Speaker 2 (01:46:43):
Cause the rats like knocking holes in the ceiling too.
At this point, the rats don't becoming bolder and more destructive.

Speaker 3 (01:46:49):
There is the scene where he's at work and his
briefcase spills out spills all over the floor in front
of everybody. And it's all like poison rubber gloves. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:46:59):
Big rubber gloves because. Yeah, because Cleet tells him it
one way. It's like, you've been using rubber gloves the
whole time, right? Because otherwise you're going to get your
human scent on it and that ruins it. And it's
this whole back and forth. He's like, you didn't tell
me to get the gloves. And so he has to
get the gloves.

Speaker 3 (01:47:12):
He starts sleeping in a hammock hanging from the ceiling
because he's afraid of the rat crawling up on him.
Because there's this scene where the rat crawls up on
his bed earlier. At one point late in the film,
he has an encounter with Cleet where obviously the tables
have turned. Like at first, Cleet was the crazy one.
but Bart has now lapped him. Bart's in the middle

(01:47:33):
of making this rat killing club and testing it out
on his furniture. And now he's weirded out by him. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:47:39):
Like he's transformed the, like the snap traps into this
just brutal club. Like instead of like, I mean, it is, it's,
it's like the technique of rat killing has become the
most like base human violent option possible. It's just a,
a spiked club for attacking rats. And yeah, cleat comes
in and I don't recall if they even, Exchange words

(01:48:00):
or if they do, it's very minimal, but it's more like, yeah,
just that sort of observation that they have changed places here.
And that one is that now Bart is the one
that is has descended more into madness and paranoia.

Speaker 3 (01:48:14):
There's kind of a training montage where Bart is like
hitting baseballs into the boiler room door. and working out.
Like he's like Rocky getting ready to kill the rat.
We are up to, I think, 100% at this point.

Speaker 2 (01:48:26):
Like rat is thinking about Bart 100% of the time
and Bart is thinking about the rat 100% of the time.

Speaker 3 (01:48:32):
That's exactly where you want to be.

Speaker 2 (01:48:34):
And there may be no sleep.

Speaker 3 (01:48:35):
Yeah, yeah. There's also the scene right before the final
showdown where Bart's sitting in his bed with a beer,
eating a pickle. And he finishes the pickle and then
he's like, okay, time to make a baseball bat with
nails in it. And so he covers himself with hockey
pads and he makes this modified baseball bat with the
rat trap pieces and the nails in. And there's a

(01:48:58):
final action scene where they just, it's just mayhem throughout
the house. Like almost every surface of the house is destroyed.
They're chasing each other around the house, trying to kill
one another. Bart smashes everything. He chases the rat into
the boiler room, ends up smashing pipes there and flooding
the basement.

Speaker 2 (01:49:17):
Model home destroyed, I believe at this point.

Speaker 3 (01:49:20):
Finally, after so long locked in Mortal Kombat, Bart kills
the rat. He successfully beats it down with the studded
baseball bat. I think it's in the house, in the
model house when this happens. And then he sort of
like wanders back up through his completely destroyed mansion. Just then,
Meg and Peter arrive back home from their vacation. And

(01:49:41):
Meg's like, what happened? And he says, I had a party.

Speaker 2 (01:49:46):
And then we pretty much go to credits at that point.
That's it.

Speaker 3 (01:49:49):
That's the end.

Speaker 2 (01:49:50):
Which gives us, I mean, it a lot to think about.
I'm still thinking about the ending and exactly how to
take it. Like on one hand, I am absolutely glad
that he defeated the rat. Cause I was, again, no
matter how crazy he got, I was 100% on the
human side here. Um, and, um, and then, so I,
I didn't want the ending where the rat wins or

(01:50:11):
the ending where he just burns down everything and maybe
himself in the process. Like, I'm glad that he, is
reunited with his family and maybe there is this reconnection
with what's important um so i like yeah it's a
positive aspect there.

Speaker 3 (01:50:26):
You're it's not moby dick in that regard because it
doesn't have the ending of moby dick right yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:50:33):
But i imagine there's yeah some level i'm sure there
are people out who watched it and thought the ending
was maybe a cop-out it should have gone for a
darker ending uh but i think there's still plenty of
darkness to go around here like there are some severe
underlying problems here that have not all been solved through
rat murder. Um, and, uh, and they're going to have
to work those out.

Speaker 3 (01:50:53):
Yeah. Coming back to Peter Weller's thoughts about the themes
of the movie. What do you think now that we've
talked through the whole thing? And he, is that like
nature cannot be contained thing really in there? I don't know.
It seems like it's more about like Peter Weller's character,
like what's going on in his brain. What does this
mean to him?

Speaker 2 (01:51:12):
Yeah, I think so. I think it is more psychological.
And if we're looking for the positive spin at the end,
I think, again, maybe the most I can really latch
on to is that he's deciding to invest more in
what's important. I think it might have resonated a little
stronger had he not killed the rat. Like, what if
at the end he was like, I'm done fighting the rat.

(01:51:34):
I'm just going to reunite with my family. Like, maybe
that would have pushed that interpretation a little more firmly.
But we get the defeat of the rat as well,
which on another level is satisfying. So I don't know.
It's kind of a head scratcher. I'm still scratching my
head over it. But on the whole, I think it
is a terrific film that really does a great job

(01:51:55):
of intelligently pondering this man versus rat scenario, this sort
of Moby Dick situation, these themes of control and the
illusion of control, midlife anxiety in the modern world. I
think it all resonates really strongly. And certainly holds up today.

Speaker 3 (01:52:13):
We never learn if he gets the promotion.

Speaker 2 (01:52:16):
Well, I guess maybe that's not as important. Yeah. I mean, granted,
he decided rat fighting was more important than that. But
hopefully he has decided family is more important than that.

Speaker 3 (01:52:26):
My wife and child are the really important thing. Yeah. Yes.

Speaker 2 (01:52:30):
Now that the rat's out of the way. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:52:33):
Okay. Does that do it for this one?

Speaker 2 (01:52:36):
I think so, yeah. I'd say pretty much the best
rap movie I've ever seen. So I'd love to hear
from anyone out there. I'd be very curious if anyone
saw this one in the wild, in the theaters, or
you encountered it in the video stores and so forth. Yeah,
write in. We'd love to hear your thoughts of Unknown Origin.
Just a reminder to everyone out there, the Stuff to
Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast

(01:52:58):
with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, short form on Wednesdays,
and then on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns.
to just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema.
If you are on Letterboxd.com, look us up there. We
are Weird House on there. We have a nice list
of all the films we've covered over the years and
sometimes a peek ahead at what is coming up next.
And speaking of what's coming up next, the current plan

(01:53:19):
is we're going to take an extra buffer week of
reruns so we can work ahead on October content. So
if you see a week of reruns coming up and
a little more Weird House Rewind in the mix, just
know that that's a That's a down payment on more
new content to come out in October.

Speaker 3 (01:53:36):
Huge thanks, as always, to our excellent audio producer, JJ Posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other to suggest
a topic for the future or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact at stufftoblowyourmind.com.

Speaker 1 (01:53:58):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production of iHeartRadio.
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