Of Unknown Origin [DVD]

A low-rent horror flick from the early 1980s, Of Unknown Origin completely misses the mark in the scare stakes and instead comes across like a grisly, live-action version of Tom and Jerry. Our inept hero is the ambitious, house-proud executive Bart Hughes (Peter Weller), who is left alone by his wife and son to complete a business proposal only to discover that he is sharing his apartment with a mischievous giant rat. Unable to trap or poison his foe, Hughes quickly descends into nightmare-haunted madness and thus the stage is set for a suspenseless battle of wits that is less cat-and-mouse and more idiot-versus-rat.

Finding an angry rodent swimming in your toilet might be a pretty unpleasant prospect, but cinematically speaking it's far from terrifying. Created using jerky point-of-view shots and creature effects that range from incongruous real-life footage to button-eyed glove puppets, the rat is an unthreatening villain, despite Weller's best efforts to react in abject horror when he finds the corners of his mail nibbled or his dry groceries spoiled. There are some unsuccessful attempts to make Hughes' plight more immediate to the audience by references to real-life rat problems--he visits a library to research his enemy and finds some disturbing photographs of rat-attack victims and subsequently ruins a dinner party with a genuinely unsettling rant about infestation and plagues--but it's difficult to feel sorry for him when he can't even muster the tenacity to track down a professional exterminator. By the time Weller gets caught in one of his own traps, you will probably be rooting for the rat anyway, and might take some pleasure from a ridiculous denouement in which, dressed in full battle-gear, he completely destroys his beloved apartment by clumsily chasing the elusive vermin with a nail-studded baseball bat. Gore Verbinski's genuinely hilarious Mousehunt did it with a lot more charm.

On the DVD: Of Unknown Origin comes to DVD with a basic selection of extras. An entertaining commentary from Peter Weller and the likeable George P Cosmatos III does the film a lot of favours, even if their efforts to talk up its importance as an allegory for man's struggle against nature using comparisons with The Old Man and the Sea, Moby Dick, Alien and Jaws fail to convince. Added to this is the theatrical trailer ("If it doesn't scare you to death, it WILL find another way!"), a choice of languages and scene selection. --Paul Philpott

• Feature-length audio commentary by Peter Weller and Director George P. Cosmatos
  
• Interactive menus
  
• Scene access
  
• Trailer

DVD Technical Information:

• Aspect Ratio: 1:85.1 Widescreen
  
• Colour
  
• PAL
  
• Audio: 1.0 Mono
  
• Running time: 85 minutes
  
• Language options: English, French
  
• Hearing Impaired: English
  
• Subtitles: English, French, Arabic, Dutch
  
• Region Code: 2

When not mired in the corporate rat race, Wall Street executive Bart Hughes is king of his sleek Manhattan brownstone. Suddenly his castle is under siege. Bart takes a stand – with his survival and sanity at stake. Peter Weller (Robocop, Odyssey 5) plays Bart in Of Unknown Origin, an eerie and nerve-tingling suspense thriller directed by George P. Cosmatos (Tombstone, Cobra) and the winner of Paris International Film Festival Awards (1983) for Best Picture and Actor. Cleverly and compellingly, the film draws us into yet another rat race, namely one with an intruder that’s formidable, persistent and clever enough to draw Bart along an unwitting path to self-destruction. In the battle of man vs. beast, push has come to scream.