Peter Weller is such an interesting actor and it’s shame his most iconic role, Robocop, basically had most of his face and body covered up. Watching him act, particularly in the early 1980s, there’s such a loose, wired energy to his physicality, complimented by his sonorous voice. The film, Of Unknown Origin (1983), is marketed as a horror movie and works as a creature feature where Weller as Bart Hughes, a highly functional corporate suit faces off against a large, vindictive rat that is taking over his brownstone apartment. The duel kicks off once Weller’s wife (Tanya Roberts) and child (Leif Anderson) are on holiday and it’s him alone. Director George P. Cosmatos (Rambo First Blood Part II, Cobra and Tombstone) keeps this simple premise visually interesting with his use of framing, the way windows reflect interiors, how the character’s growing obsession with the rat becomes a satirical symbol of his own masculine sense of control and the “rat race” he’s stuck in. There’s a shot of Weller walking to camera alongside a building while people dart to and fro past him that is simply divine (the cinematography is by Rene Verzier). The ways in which the rat is characterised with POV shots and unnerving close ups of its body while never seeing the full thing works really well to create a sense of threat and anxiety. Set in New York but filmed in Canada as evidenced by some of the supporting cast (the dude who plays the building’s intense super is someone whose head explodes in Scanners aka Louis Del Grande). Alongside the visual flourishes and the ways in which Weller’s life becomes unstuck with this rodent intruder, the greatest asset the film has is Weller himself, grounding everything while keeping dialled in to the film’s competing tones of humour and suspense. Great scene where Weller crafts a make-shift weapon, adding blades and spikes to a baseball bat (a sequence the director’s son, Panos Cosmatos, may have paid tribute to in the crafting of a weapon in Mandy?). While the ending might not pay off its promise as a satirical character study, it is an underrated, strange comedy horror. Recommended.
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