Prisoner Of Sympathy

Questioning motives
A sure sign of disrepair
A vague accusation
Distrust laid bare
A week of silence
After six years of chat
No further explanation
The line is flat

A disrupted rhythm
A permanent pause
An awkward tension
An unjust cause
A misunderstanding
Frozen in place
A waste of time
A past to erase

A cracked foundation
Too broken to seal
Paranoid delusions
Too dumb to be real
Endless confusion
Never set aside
No longer tolerant
Emphatically denied

A hovering gloom
A dark cloud of regret
A sudden disengagement
An unexpected reset
Toxic feelings
Difficult to shake
A lingering resentment
Left in its wake

Constant support
Never deprived
But when the roles reversed
Suspicion arrived
An uncomfortable revelation
An exposed duplicity
Shattering the illusion
Of synchronicity

A rock solid rapport
Crumbled into dust
There was no chemistry
Not even lust
Ironic considering
The subjects discussed
This final occasion
Ending with disgust

A prisoner of sympathy
Too polite to be blunt
Exceedingly kind
Despite baring the brunt
A series of fires
Extinguished on cue
No time for other matters
Time to slip out of view

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Wednesday, April 22, 2020
7:11 p.m.

John Carter

The story of how Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Princess Of Mars finally hit the big screen after nearly a century of delays is certainly more interesting than the eventual feature film inspired by it.

Originally conceived as a possible animated movie for Warner Bros. in the 1930s the stalled project passed through studio after studio decade after decade until it finally landed for a second time at Disney where it ultimately became a derivative action epic.

Released in 2012 and renamed after its reluctant hero, there was much anticipation for John Carter.  With an obscene 250 million shooting budget plus 350 million more attributed to promotion all at its disposal, no expense was spared on the uneven visuals.  If only there was as much care put into the actual, overly familiar story.

The aptly named Taylor Kitsch plays the title role, a wealthy, obsessive treasure hunter.  Widowed and rendered childless through mysterious circumstances, like Lt. John Dunbar, he’s a cavalryman tired of fighting “shameful” wars.  Kitsch tries to sound like Eastwood with his soft, gravelly tone but he looks like a Guess Jeans model in need of a shave.

After multiple escapes, all played for non-existent laughs, from a team led by fellow officer Bryan Cranston, who wants him manning a colonial post in Arizona, the two end up paired together and, while being pursued by pissed off Apaches, retreat near a mysterious cave where the hero suddenly and violently encounters a man transported from another world.

As the stranger lies dying in the dirt, he chants something in a mysterious language.  Kitsch hangs onto his glowing blue medallion and after the final word is uttered, he himself is teleported to Mars, or Barsoom, as the natives call it.  It takes him nearly an hour to realize where he is.  He’s pretty but stupid.

In the opening scene, we are told that the red planet is not airless or dead, but it is dying, thanks to a triumvirate of sorcerers who interrupt a forgettable civil war to recruit Dominic West as their newest puppet dictator.  Bestowing him with a powerful weapon that vaporizes his growing list of enemies, they seemingly give him free reign to rule but in truth, he does what they tell him to.  (His immediate attempt to screw them is easily anticipated and instantly thwarted.)  They do this because they want to be perceived as legend.  I think they’re just lazy and cowardly.  I’m amazed none of them are named Trump.

Meanwhile, Kitsch is discovered by a tribe of green aliens, each with a set of ram-like horns on their faces and two sets of arms.  Their leader is voiced by the always committed Willem Dafoe (they’re all CGI characters) who thinks the visitor’s name is Virginia, his home state, a tired running gag, before he’s given a new Martian name you won’t remember.

Upon landing on Mars, Kitsch suddenly turns into Super Mario, discovering quite by accident that he can’t walk normally.   Instead, he leaps and bounces about so much he cuts down on travel time considerably.  Dafoe’s alien is adamant he demonstrate this power to his tribe or else.  Curiously, there’s a scene where he actually does this in a failed effort to try to retrieve that time-travelling medallion but I guess that doesn’t count.  Kitsch also learns he’s as strong as Hercules.

Resistant to being an on-call circus monkey, he’s taken prisoner where he’s given something to drink.  Suddenly, instead of listening to made-up gobbledygook passing for a foreign language, he now hears perfect English.  This is some potent shit.

In the meantime, West and his overseers are determined to conquer the city of Helium where sadly no one speaks in a really high voice.  They hatch a secret plan.  Rather than just bomb the place like everywhere else they’ve destroyed, they force the ruling king into a bad deal.   Make your hot daughter, the princess, West’s wife and they’ll rule together.  Of course, there’s a swerve waiting in the wings.

The princess is a master swordsman and a scientist.  She’s on the verge of discovering that West’s new weapon is actually The Ninth Ray.  (Don’t ask.)  But one of the shapeshifting sorcerers deliberately delays that eventual awareness through not-so-subtle but undetected sabotage.

Once she knows of West’s intentions, she bolts and is rescued by Kitsch who at first only sees her as a damsel in distress.  (The movie is set in the 1880s.)  Alternately, it takes her quite a while to believe his story.  She’s also pretty but stupid.

John Carter is a shameless patchwork of a whole bunch of other famous movies.  The floating boats in the desert are straight out of Return Of The Jedi.  Kitsch’s dilemma and the breathtaking Utah scenery feel a lot like the original Planet Of The Apes, especially the sequence where they travel by river.

The scene where Kitsch and two of the green aliens find themselves battling two giant hairy beasts, also with two sets of arms, is the dungeon scene with Luke from Jedi with the white snow creature from The Empire Strikes Back set in the outdoor arena from Gladiator.

The aftermath, where the hero finds himself covered in the creature’s blue blood, suddenly turns into a tribute of sorts to Braveheart, where Kitsch rallies the green aliens for an eventual invasion of Helium.  All the routine fight scenes, not always easy to follow and sometimes difficult to see especially when set at night, are straight out of countless swords-and-sandals epics.

And am I wrong in thinking that the disruption of the wedding is straight out of The Graduate?  All that’s missing is Simon & Garfunkel and a bus ride into the credits.

And yet, there are some enjoyable moments, most of them humourous.  One of the green aliens smacking Kitsch in the head when he fucks up.  Another alien wiping away the tear of her strict father during a second wedding. The princess watching her clone fleeing and declaring, “I’m getting away!”  And Willem Dafoe’s rival, voiced by Thomas Hayden Church, looking very bored when one of his hairy beasts isn’t getting the job done, so he orders a second to enter the fray.

My favourite CGI character is easily lovable Woola, Kitsch’s faithful animal companion that won’t be denied.  Honestly, who wouldn’t melt at the sight of an instantly loyal, supremely speedy, always panting Martian dog?  And I’m not a dog guy.

But of course brief seconds of pleasure can never overcompensate for an otherwise overlong 132-minute running time.  Some critics were brutal in their assessment of John Carter perhaps because their expectations were so severely unmet.  When you have a deep appreciation of the long running series of Burroughs’ more popular and acclaimed original stories, you feel the mediocrity more personally.  The truth is, for me anyway, it’s a more average disappointment than a full-on disaster as it showcases very forgettable characters with equally forgettable names reciting dialogue that sometimes sounds corny.

That said, it also has a White Saviour problem at its heart.  The tribe of greenies can’t defeat West and his army on their own.  They need the long-haired hunky honky to lead them to peace through violence.  Even the redskinned princess (a very white Lynn Collins in redface (she’s not the only one) is not offensive in itself, no sir), fully capable of swordplay and scientificy stuff on her own, has to be saved time and time again.

The movie was directed by Andrew Stanton, the Pixar filmmaker who made WALL-E and the seriously overrated Finding Nemo.  He had grand ambitions for John Carter.  It was supposed to be the first in a trilogy of epic adventures, not unlike Star Wars.  But because it lost hundreds of millions of dollars, Disney wasn’t willing to sink any more into a follow-up, let alone two.

John Carter even ends with a possible title for that unmade second film.  If only they got it right the first time.

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Sunday, April 19, 2020
9:52 p.m.

Rampage (2018)

Rampage is yet another action thriller where the villain doesn’t kill the hero when the perfect opportunity presents itself.  In this case, make that two perfect opportunities.

A miscast, dark-haired Malin Akerman, the more detached half of a brother-and-sister tag team that inherited their family’s shady scientific company called Energyne, literally takes the gun from her wimpier sibling Jack Lacey and instead of shooting The Rock in the head, she pops him in the stomach.

Minutes later, the former multiple time WWE Champion reemerges as though it never happened.  Akerman “missed his vital organs”, he deadpans, which doesn’t explain how he can still function normally without doubling over in agony.  Like all similarly reluctant Bond villains before her, it’s no wonder her diabolical scheme eventually crumbles into nothing.

And what is that scheme exactly?  To take the best genes of various existing animals, alter and combine them in order to create monstrous superbeasts, the kind that aren’t so easy to kill.  In other words, a superior, high functioning bioweapon.  The hope is to sell them to the highest bidder.  Did she not see Alien?

The Rock, in one of his better performances, plays essentially the same role Chris Pratt had in the Jurassic World movies.  But instead of being a dino whisperer, he’s a primate whisperer, one who can communicate with them through sign language and kindness.  It’s nice to see him here as a more gentle spirit, for the most part.  He only kicks ass when he needs to.

He’s particularly close to George, a rare albino ape orphaned by poachers The Great One literally put out of business.  George, it turns out, is cheeky.  While leading a small group of colleagues out to see a family of apes, we learn that his favourite primate is not only a prankster but a big fan of Stone Cold Steve Austin’s favourite gesture.  George even laughs at his own handiwork.  I didn’t.

A loner more at home with straightforward animals than duplicitous humans (he even turns down a potential date with a cute young woman who literally puts “submission” in her sales pitch), The Rock is called back to work because George has gone literally apeshit.  Suddenly larger than before, the ashamed albino has knocked off some grizzly bears, something that never happens.  No cage can contain him for long.

Unbeknownst to the poor creature, that mysterious object that falls from the sky and lands into his protected lair contains a pathogen, created by the Energyne scientists, that turns ordinary animals into the aforementioned superbeasts.  Because fucking with nature’s genome is now illegal (why it took 23 years to arouse the suspicion of the deep state is never addressed), a successful experiment is conducted in secret with a test rat on a space station that can’t contain the bad mistake created there.  (The rat doesn’t look good, by the way.)

As the movie progresses, old Georgie boy gets taller and weightier.  And stronger and angrier.  He should’ve taken his frustrations out on the screenwriters.

Naomie Harris plays a Snowden-esque whistleblower already screwed over by Akerman.  While seeking a cure for her brother’s terminal cancer, she was railroaded for trying to expose the Energyne leader’s evil intentions.  While serving 13 months in the clink, he died.  When she watches the news coverage of mysterious comets hitting the earth, she springs into action and lies to The Rock about her history.  She fills in the blanks for him.  Harris does what she can but she’s not a character, she’s ongoing plot exposition.  At least they don’t fall in love.

After George escapes and gets tranquilized before getting out too far, The Rock and Harris are also taken into military custody where they encounter a very smug and annoyingly Southern Jeffrey Dean Morgan, a CIA guy not as smart as he thinks he is.  The Rock warns him not to put the agitated albino on the plane.  Morgan repeatedly assures him the beast will stay asleep.

But when Akerman climbs to the roof of her company’s building, opens up a secret laptop and presses a button, a high-pitched signal is emitted which wakes up Georgie and, well, let’s just say Morgan is very lucky The Rock is neither petty nor vengeful.

George isn’t the only animal affected by this dangerous pathogen.  There’s also a croc that somehow sports porcupine pricks which can singlehandedly bring down a chopper and a flying wolf that obliterates its own brethren.  When the Energyne signal is sent out, all three superbeasts, the only ones who can hear it, leap, climb and trample their way through downtown Chicago redecorating it as they see fit with the ultimate goal of shutting off that irritating noise.  Again, they should’ve attacked the screenwriters.  They’re a more worthy target.

Now firmly on Team Bring It, Morgan tries to convince an overly gung-ho military colonel (Demetrius Grosse) not to send in the Mother Of All Bombs after George and the wolf wipe out one of his teams.  Not only is there not enough time to evacuate everyone, dropping just one of these suckers could effectively decimate much of the hometown of CM Punk.  Siskel & Ebert would not approve!  Two thumbs down!

After easily knocking out two military escorts, The Rock along with Harris swipe a medavac (Morgan throws them the keys), fly into The Windy City and sneak into the Energyne building hoping to find properly stored antidotes for all three supersized creatures in order to stop their, um, rampage.  But once they do, Akerman and Lacey, who spot them on their in-house surveillance monitors, suddenly show up taking back the antidotes and blocking their path.  That’s when Akerman makes her first mistake.  Incredibly, she gets another opportunity to finish the job and blows that, too.  The bitch talks too much.

Rampage is, of course, based on the famous arcade game where humans transformed into King Kong knock-offs pass through levels after destroying buildings, civilians and military personnel.  (Notice the villains have a plugged-in machine in their surveillance room.)  It proved so successful it spawned several sequels.  In fact, the most recent version is a direct tie-in with this film, both released two years ago.

I haven’t played the original in ages but I remember it being a lot more fun than this.  This Rampage, with its obvious Kong connections, is too much like Godzilla and not the good Godzilla from 2014.  Yes, there’s no denying the high quality of the special effects, especially the look of the Earth-bound superbeasts and the havoc they wreak.  Following the lead of Gollum from The Lord Of The Rings trilogy, some of the George sequences were achieved with a guy in a motion capture suit mimicking the sounds and movements of the eventual albino.  The rest are effective CGI.

And there are a couple of genuine laughs (Morgan’s dastardly trick on Lacey; a funny bit of sarcasm from Harris) besides two unintentional ones.  (I can’t take a floating hand in space very seriously.  Also, the debut appearance of the flying wolf looks really silly from a distance, like a magic carpet ride from Aladdin.)

The 2014 Godzilla had legitimately funny moments, too, but most of them were relegated to the very clever opening credit sequence (pause just before the redactions to see some very funny inside jokes).  But it was also compelling and surprising, the opposite of a high-concept throwaway.  Like George, it didn’t see its monster as an actual monster but a victim of science gone wrong and ironically, the solution to its own problem.

Beyond that, though, Rampage is routine nonsense, as well as a loud, barrelling stampede of unanswered questions.  Who is going to buy a genetically altered monster that can’t be controlled at all?  How does Energyne expect to make such a transaction without being bankrupted by a government prosecution?  How is it at all possible to make those pathogen containers from space immune from being burned up upon reentry?  And how the fuck is The Rock able to run around pain-free after being shot in the fucking stomach?

After the dust literally settles, there’s an obligatory finale.  A certain character performs a heroic act and seemingly perishes.  I knew he wasn’t actually dead.  Why?  Because I anticipated the screenwriters wanting to repeat an extremely obvious gag from earlier in the film.  Let’s just say, the feeling is mutual.

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Sunday, April 19, 2020
7:54 p.m.

Three Men Who Survived WrestleMania Retirement Matches

If you’re a professional wrestler, what’s the best way to humiliate your rival?

Is it smacking them repeatedly with a steel chair until they beg you to stop?  Is it breaking a certain part of their body forcing them out of action for an indeterminate amount of time?  What about cockblocking them so you can date their love interest and rub this new relationship in their face?  Or how about forcing them to tap out to a particularly excruciating submission hold during a title match?

Nope.

The most surefire way to destroy your enemy’s self-esteem is to retire them.  What’s more satisfying than that?  Not only are you free to move on to the next program, you can take comfort in the fact that your vanquished rival will be seething powerlessly wondering where it all went wrong.

The retirement match, where one or both wrestlers put their careers on the line if they lose, is as old as the hills.  It’s a gimmick best reserved for the most heated disputes that require permanent social distancing.  What better place to showcase such a special encounter than at WrestleMania.

From the very first show 35 years ago to last year’s event, there have been special occasions where specific superstars were placed in career threatening situations only to have to work a little harder to get the duke.  Otherwise, they’d have to join the audience while watching someone else take their spot.

Several years ago in this space, I noted five wrestlers who had their last match at Mania, whether they succumbed to an advertised stipulation or made a quiet off-camera decision.  This was expanded to eight for a Huffington Post article in 2015.  Kurt Angle is the most recent superstar to end his career, in this case willingly, at the Showcase Of The Immortals.  He put over Baron…pardon me, King Corbin, on his way out the door in 2019.

Not mentioned in either of those pieces was the fact that Shawn Michaels is the only man in WWE history to retire twice at WrestleMania.  12 years before his final singles match with The Undertaker in 2010, a seriously injured Heartbreak Kid struggled through a back problem to give Stone Cold Steve Austin his first World title push at WrestleMania 14.  It wasn’t a retirement match per se but because Michaels was in rough shape, he effectively ended his in-ring career immediately after.  Thanks to a long, slow rehabilitation, he returned to full-time competition in the summer of 2002.

But not everyone put in the awkward position of having to defend their employment with the McMahon Family has had to say a premature good-bye to the job they love.  Here are the three superstars who survived their retirement matches, including a certain son-in-law (twice, in his case), on the grandest stage of them all.

1. Andre The Giant (WrestleMania – March 31, 1985)

On the December 18, 1982 edition of Championship Wrestling, as noted by TheHistoryOfWWE.com, Big John Studd issued an open challenge on Buddy Rogers’ Corner.  If you could somehow scoop him up and slam his giant ass to the mat, he would give you 500 smackers.

Curiously, fans from the audience were the first to try (or were they plants?).  All would fail.

Then, it was up to the jobbers to have a go.  Same result.

As the weeks went by, also recounted by The History Of WWE, the reward for bodyslaming Studd would continuously rise.  During the Christmas 1982 episode of Championship Wrestling, it had doubled to a thousand.  By early January 1983, it was raised to $3000.  By the end of January, it was up to seven.

The future Mr. Perfect Curt Hennig made an attempt when it was $8000.  No dice.  SD Jones went for it when it was $8500.  Nope.  Tony Garea wasn’t able to do it when it was $9000 nor the much missed Gorilla Monsoon who tried when it got up to ten.

On the February 26, 1983 episode of Championship Wrestling, The History Of WWE website acknowledges Andre The Giant’s first encounter with his second most famous rival as he took his own shot.  Thanks to the well timed interference of his manager “Classy” Freddie Blassie, Studd was spared from forking over the money.  A couple of weeks later during a March 12 broadcast, the bodyslam challenge was suspended because, according to Blassie, as recounted by The History Of WWE, there were “no more worthy challengers”.  Uh huh.

Andre and Studd had their first singles match two weeks later at the Boston Garden.  The Giant won by count-out.  Over the next two years, as The History Of WWE thoroughly documents, they would face off in countless more encounters at live events, only some of which were taped, and not always in one-on-one situations.

Early on, there were bodyslam teases where Andre would almost get the job done but either Studd would manage to wiggle free, hold onto the top rope or be saved by outside interference.  According to TheHistoryOfWWE.com, during an September 18, 1983 episode of All-American Wrestling, it took all three future Conquistadors to stop Andre from winning the challenge.

In the build to the first WrestleMania in 1985, Studd, now represented by Bobby “The Brain” Heenan who took over for Blassie in the summer of 1984, issued his ultimatum.  He would fight Andre in Madison Square Garden.  It would not be a regular match.  The Bodyslam Challenge, which had never really gone away despite no longer being a specific TV segment, would be the sole purpose of the bout.  If Andre could get ‘er done, he’d earn $15000, the highest amount that would ever be offered.  If he failed, he would have to retire.  He’d have 60 minutes to make it happen.

It took him less than six.  And when he got the money, Andre decided to throw it out to the fans until Heenan swooped in to take back the officially licensed WWF gym bag which held the remaining amount.

The result was probably not a surprise to those intimately familiar with the Andre/Studd rivalry.  They already had a number of Bodyslam matches before back when the reward was $10000.  (After losing one such encounter, it was Studd himself who stopped his rival from being generous with his reward.)  Long before the first WrestleMania, Andre first slammed Studd, according to The History Of WWE, during an earlier MSG event on June 17, 1983 in one of the rare times he won by pinfall.

2. Hulk Hogan (WrestleMania 19 – March 30, 2003)

After the New World Order split in the aftermath of WrestleMania 18 and the end of his brief stint as Edge’s tag partner, The Racist One resumed being a solo act in the company that made him an icon.  In the build-up to WrestleMania 19, Vince McMahon, in his thinly disguised Mr. McMahon heel persona, started being a pest to the former six-time World champion.

Having cost him a victory in a return match with The Rock at No Way Out in 2003, McMahon made it clear he hated Hogan.  (He was ahead of his time.)  He resented his departure for WCW a decade earlier and still held a grudge against him for testifying for the prosecution in the ultimately unsuccessful steroid trial that rocked the entire business.

McMahon went so far as to pull a Bobby Heenan.  “Hulkamania is dead!” he unconvincingly declared.  It has been replaced by McMahonmania.  Sure.

All of this lead to a no holds barred street fight between the two at WrestleMania 19.  McMahon challenged Hogan to put his career on the line as a key stipulation which he readily accepted.

During their inevitable on-screen contract signing on an episode of Smackdown!, the WWE chairman whacked Hogan in the head several times causing him to bleed.  He then forced him to sign the deal with his own blood, as noted by Wikipedia.

During the match, Hogan was attacked by a mystery man with a lead pipe.  That mystery man turned out to be “Rowdy” Roddy Piper in what would become his final, ill-fated heel run.  It ultimately didn’t matter.  Having already cashed in his receipt against his boss (he made him shed some blood in his own right), Hogan delivered a trio of leg drops to secure the victory and remain a WWE superstar.

3. Triple H (WrestleMania 29 – April 7, 2013 & WrestleMania 35 – April 7, 2019)

Stephanie McMahon’s husband is the only performer in the history of the event to have survived two retirement matches on the grandest stage of them all.

Back in 2012, when a returning Brock Lesnar started making unreasonable demands during an episode of Monday Night Raw, Triple H tried to reason with him hoping he would reconsider.  Instead, he got attacked from behind setting up a trio of pay-per-view matches.

Lesnar won round one at SummerSlam 2012.  As he did on Raw to kickstart the feud, Lesnar ultimately “broke” Triple H’s arm with a kimura lock.  Just before the event, he made sure H’s old pal Shawn Michaels wouldn’t be in his corner so he F5’d him and broke his arm, too, assuring his absence.

Two months before round two at WrestleMania 29 nearly a year later, a now fully recovered Triple H, who didn’t make it to the bathroom before this Raw segment, went out to the ring to prevent The Beast from attacking his father-in-law for the second time.  As he pissed his pants (there was no mistaking that big stain), The Cerebral Assassin slammed Lesnar’s head in the post causing him to accidentally bleed profusely (which, upon re-aired, repackaged replays looked even cooler in black and white).

Lesnar’s mouthpiece Paul Heyman insisted that H retire if The former Next Big Thing could beat him in their anything goes contest.  With a fully recovered Michaels now ready to be in his corner, the tide turned.  Triple H won with a pedigree on the bottom half of one of the steel steps inside the ring.  (Lesnar would go on to win their final encounter inside a steel cage at Extreme Rules.)

Six years later, while Raw was celebrating Ric Flair’s 70th Birthday, a stunned Triple H watched his former Evolution brother Batista drag out The Nature Boy’s groggy carcass from his dressing room backstage.  So began the build to another WrestleMania retirement angle.

Like Kurt Angle, Batista wanted one last pay-per-view match before signing off for good.  (When you’re a big-time movie star, why continue to subject yourself to any more staged beatings for less money?)  Triple H wasn’t interested in a fight, even though he had never pinned The Animal in their three previous high profile encounters.  Batista pressured him to change his mind and also convinced him to put his own career at risk.

At WrestleMania 35, after clumsily tripping over his own feet as he first entered the ring, which led to a momentary break of character and a more cautious re-do, Batista went to war with The Game.  Triple H was up for the fight.  In a memorable spot, he pulled out the Blade Runner 2049 star’s nose piercing and later ran across a couple of announce tables to spear him through a third, stealing one of The Animal’s signature moves.

With a concerned Shawn Michaels on commentary and a returning Flair arriving in the final stages, H was handed his trusty sledgehammer from his still loyal Evolution compadre.  Batista’s goal of having a clean sweep and finishing off The Game for good was lost.  Triple H survived.

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Tuesday, April 7, 2020
12:35 a.m.

Of Unknown Origin (1983)

Peter Weller has a problem, a big distraction not so easily ignored.

It’s not his devoted wife Shannon Tweed.  She leaves with their young son in the first five minutes.  It’s not his hot secretary Jennifer Dale.  He only offers her a brief, inappropriate smooch.

Nope.  It’s a rat.

In Of Unknown Origin, Weller is the essence of white privilege, a high ranking financial executive on the verge of a big promotion, even though he’s a little peeved he’s been taken off a major merger deal he helped orchestrate.  He lives with his family in a large house that from the outside looks like a mini-castle.  Somehow, this workaholic found time to completely renovate the entire interior himself.

After his family quickly departs to visit Tweed’s father in Vermont, Weller stays behind to work on an important, unrelated project.  But it’s hard to focus with all those unexplained “house sounds”.  At one point, he walks into the kitchen as the floor fills with water leaked from his now damaged dishwasher.

The great Louis Del Grande, the exploding head from Scanners, plays a very helpful Mr. Fix-It.  When he’s not admiring the tile work of his renovated kitchen, he’s telling him what he should do about the mysterious rat responsible for the flood.

So, a dutiful Weller lays out old school wood traps with cheese all over the house.  However, the rat has such powerful choppers it eats through the back of one while ignoring the rest.  Del Grande scolds him for not using the more ruthless steel contraptions.  Weller then performs a test with one of his son’s dolls.  It’s easily decapitated.

But this rat is apparently the rodent Einstein, not so easily fooled and absurdly cunning.  It’s pointless to put out that bowl of poison, even though it looks like sugar.  It will remain untouched.  Don’t bother bringing home a stray cat.  It’s doomed.  And unless you set up surveillance equipment, good luck being one step ahead.  This thing is always too fast and constantly on the move.  It never sleeps.

Running out of ideas and patience, Weller starts rifling through the Yellow Pages in his office.  But it’s impossible to get an exterminator on the phone.  He lives in New York, after all.

So Weller starts researching in the public library.  He watches a National Film Board of Canada doc showing laboratory rat moms eating their hairless pink babies.  Sure enough, his rat, also a mom, has just given birth to a whole litter in his boiler room.  He’s not the only one laying a trap.

Why is this thing so vindictive?  And what does she have against Weller in particular?  The crazy thing is if she just focused on eating food on the sly without drawing attention to herself, she’d have it made.  There’s no reason to be this nasty.  The animosity is baffling and not believable.

It’s been well established that rats are notorious chewers and this one is no exception.  As the movie demonstrates, poison and cheese on traps aside, she’ll eat anything, including cables which means inevitably Weller will, for a time, have no power, and later, no phone line.  And they can survive in watery environments which explains how it’s possible for her to swim through drain pipes without drowning and hide in a closed toilet for prolonged periods.

But are rats capable of stalking their unsuspecting prey from a window?  Are they able to spy out in the open at any time of the day even though they’re actually nocturnal?  Is it really possible they understand English?

Maybe the villain in Of Unknown Origin is an anomaly, a “super rat” with superior intelligence.  Or maybe this is just a bunch of bullshit, an obvious ruse to stretch out a thin premise into a feature-length movie.

Eventually, Weller gets a hold of an exterminator.  The plan is simple.  He’ll leave a filled out cheque for their services under the glass lid of his record player.  But when he comes home from work, there she is monkeying around in his piano.

He calls the company in a fury.  The guy yells back.  He didn’t find that cheque in the record player so he didn’t do the job.  Weller ends up spotting it all chewed up in a different location.  Really?

Are you asking me to accept that this rat is somehow capable of anticipating her own extinction (did she hear Weller on the phone?) and therefore, manages to lift the glass lid, snatch the cheque, chew it enough so it can’t be cashed and then just conveniently leave it behind in another place only a perplexed Weller could find it?

Is it remotely possible that the rat would know all those papers on Weller’s bed are crucial to his future standing at his company?  How does she know which ceiling needs to be broken through so she can secretly spy on Weller in his bedroom?  And how on Earth does she know where to move that steel trap in the dollhouse replica of his house?

Remarkably, despite all of this, the well photographed Of Unknown Origin is not a silly horror film, just a preposterous one.  Although it’s hard to be frightened of such transparent shenanigans (you get a number of expected jump scares), there are no bad laughs.  (There are no good laughs, either.)  Like the aggravated Weller, it more or less takes its mouse invader plot seriously, offering a slew of vermin factoids in an otherwise failed effort to give it more credibility.

Furthermore, the film goes out of its way to conceal its budget limitations by never showing too much of its fake mouse (mostly quick shots of a long tail exiting scenes) while hyperfocusing on the real rat’s face and body which will only freak out the already fearful.  Honestly, this would’ve been much worse if Ed Wood was the director.

Because it was made in Canada, the strong supporting cast, including Dale, Del Grande and the debuting Tweed, are mostly homegrown.  Longtime Canadian character actors Kenneth Welsh and the late Maury Chaykin play Weller’s work rivals, although their screen time is limited.  (What’s the deal with Chaykin’s robot?)  Perhaps because of her Playboy connection, Tweed is mostly used for decoration in gratuitous cheesecake moments.  When we first see her she’s naked in the shower (in the very first scene of the film).  Later, she’s in a one-piece swimsuit.  She’s a trophy wife, not a character.  One wonders why Weller even has a family when they play no significant role in his dilemma.  In a vulnerable moment with Dale, even he questions his marriage.

Besides the excellent Del Grande, who plays the smartest character in the film, I also liked Lawrence Cade, Weller’s supportive boss and mentor who, like Dale his secretary, goes out of his way to protect him, even offering him a welcome extension on his assignment.  When Weller meets him on the ground floor of the company building before the final act, Cade is so concerned about his disheveled appearance (messy hair, five o’clock shadow, ordinary clothes), he tells him not to go back to the office looking less than professional.  Twice.  With this powerful ally fully in his corner, it doesn’t make sense why Weller never reaches out beyond exterminators and rat experts for help.  Cade seems connected.

Weller is looking like shit because it’s taking so long to catch this goddamn rat.  Too long, quite frankly.  No longer comfortable sleeping in his own bed (the rat actually climbs under the covers and moves towards him while he works one night), he constructs a makeshift hammock high above so he’s not on the ground.  That is, when he’s not sleeping uncomfortably on a chair or in the tub.  (If the rat is so smart, why doesn’t she kill him when he’s out cold like this?)

Well before he finally devises a winning strategy, a thoroughly distracted Weller attends a business dinner.  Zoning out on the regular conversation, unprompted he proceeds to talk about rats.  Their ugly history, how they were responsible for the bubonic plague, how fast they reproduce, how some cultures worship them while others eat them.

It’s a hell of a speech.  It belongs in a better movie.

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Thursday, April 2, 2020
4:03 a.m.