13 Rats of Halloween #13

Where else could my "13 Rats of Halloween" series of posts for this here Plague Year of the Rat ultimately take me besides right to the infernal king of the scuttling befanged beasts himself, the nightmare turned flesh Nosferatu. Twas always eventual! Whether it's Klaus Kinski for Herzog or...

 

... Max Schreck for Murnau, the scariest of all the vampires has always been associated with rats. It's been ages since I actually sat down and read Bram Stoker's book of Dracula (which of course Nosferatu ripped off and almost got erased out of existence because of) so perhaps one of you more literate types can remind me if rats play much of a factor in the original text? I assume so, I just don't feel like googling it. I do know that Stephen King, when he wrote Salem's Lot...

... he removed a truly disgusting sounding scene from its earliest draft where a character is eaten alive by rats. King's (and Tobe Hooper's) Mr. Barlow of course being a direct descendant of the horrifying Nosferatu lineage of vampire.

Of course as classic as Murnau's plague scenes are I think the best plague sequence belongs to Herzog -- I consider the fancy people eating their fancy final meal together at that table in the public square that's literally swarming with pestilence to be one of the singular images of Horror Cinema. And you can tell I'm being very serious, because I busted out the word "cinema"! That means I mean it! Art! Hey... did you ever notice if you rearrange the letters in "Art" you get "Rat"? Just sayin...

Happy Halloween, everyone!

13 Rats of Halloween #12

I am never sure which I love more -- the person-shaped rat-pile that Gary Oldman turns into in Francis Ford Coppola's 1992 film Bram Stoker's Dracula, or...

... Cary Elwes' slow-motion shock-n-stache reaction 

to said rat-pile. I'm gonna call it a toss-up. 

(But only because I already wrote up this movie's mustaches last year.) God I do adore this movie so. And thankfully we've indoctrinated another member into our cult -- our pal Michael Cusumano wrote up a splendid piece at The Film Experience just yesterday, admitting he'd somehow never seen this movie until now, and how very very empty his life had been without it. I added the "empty" part but come on! Obviously!

Also, a happy one-day-belated birthday to our gal Winona Ryder! I love that Coppola shows one of the rats nipping at her toes in this moment -- do recall that thirty seconds earlier she'd been banging the hell out of that pile-of-rats. Sexually speaking. Makes one wonder which part of Dracula that rat nipping at her heel comprises. 

Anyway like all good re-tellings of the Dracula story there are rats all over Coppola's film -- and, spoiler alert, more on this tomorrow with our final entry in this year's "13 Rats of Halloween countdown! -- but this is really their moment to shine. Out of all the on-screen forms that Drac takes in this version -- green mist, erect werewolf, John Lennon -- the pile-o-rats has always been my favorite. It just has that certain je ne se quoi you're looking for. I think it's the dramatic unfolding of its arms, all like, "Here I am, bitches! Come'n get me!" that really seals the deal.

Thursday's Ways Not To Die

Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009)

As long as I'm hitting up Animated Rats in my "13 Rats of Halloween" series -- yesterday I did a post about Templeton the Paul Lynde Rat in Charlotte's Web -- I might as well hit up my maybe favorite of all Animated Movie Rats (and yes I include you, Ratatouille), the one called "Rat" and voiced by the always best-in-show Willem Dafoe in Wes Anderson's stop-motion masterpiece Fantastic Mr. Fox.

"Y'all are trespassing now. Illegally."

I love everything about Rat. I love his little finger snaps and athletic swings through the cider jars, I love that he calls Meryl Streep's character "the town tart" and "pretty as a mink stole" -- I love his little red-and-white striped sweater and that he seems genuinely dangerous in the way that Wes Anderson movies always surprise you they can be, to even out all the whimsy. I would give anything for a spin-off movie about Rat's younger days... or even just an action figure. Did they make any FMF figures? Oh to own Rat would rule!

Hit the jump for links to all the Previous Ways Not To Die

13 Rats of Halloween #10

If you thought this here website was going to make a list of rats and not include the animated one voiced by PAUL FUCKING LYNDE then you do not know this website nearly as well as you thought you did. I've spoken of the childhood trauma of the 1973 animated version of Charlotte's Web before -- this is the movie that taught me about death, ha! -- but it also taught me about being a selfish homosexual glutton, and for that I can only express gratitude. 

Templeton the Rat, gay icon! I know textually Templeton has a pile of rat children, but he'd hardly have been the only homosexual to have lead a double life in the 1970s. Just think about what his signature number "A Veritable Smorgasbord" is all about -- him sneaking off to the dark corners of the fairground at night to gobble up all the "gorgeous goop" and "candy found all around" where nobody can see him -- that's some closet queen cruising if I ever heard it. I mean...

... I just do not think...

... that I am being crazy here.

People hired Paul Lynde for a reason in 1973 -- they knew what they were doing when they hired Paul Lynde in 1973. And consider the fact that the original person they hired to voice Templeton was Tony Randall, who, although heterosexual in real life, was also usually coded as a little loafer-light back in the day. (Randall's line-readings were deemed "flat" so they redubbed the film with Lynde, who would never ever in his life be deemed "flat.")

The meta-joke was of course just in having a Fancy Man voice a ravenous slob -- there was a very narrow idea of what a gay man was in 1973 and "ravenous slob" did not fit within those parameters. Thank goodness then that Templeton came along and broke down barriers for all the ravenous gay slobs like myself! 

13 Rats of Halloween #9

My pal Stacie Ponder of Final Girl fame has branded this "The Rumpelstiltskin Effect" (actually she maybe hasn't used those exact words, but I am) -- where you keep going back to a movie you know is awful because some deranged lever snaps inside your brain and whispers to you that hey, you, maybe it's not so awful. For Stacie that movie is the 1995 Leprechaun rip-off Rumpelstiltskin -- and if you're already ripping off a rip-off like Leprechaun then you know you're in trouble. But for me, at this exact moment, that movie is the 2018 video-game adaptation Rampage. Oh my god it's bad! I know it's bad! But Marley Shelton fights a gigantic mutant rat in outer space! 

How can I not be suckered in by that time and time again? Am I not human? Do I not bleed? Speaking of you know who else bleeds? Gigantic mutant rats in outer space, that's who!

And looking back at my previous post on this movie I see so much else to love. Joe Manganiello eaten by a giant wolf? Okay! Malin "Baby Girl" Akerman eaten by a gorilla? Sure! That gorilla then flipping the bird? Why not? Is Rampage actually perfect? Who am I to say it's not perfect? I'm nobody, that's who -- there is no Jason, only Rampage now.

13 Rats of Halloween #8

"Ah, rats."

Did you know that Steven Spielberg had two thousand rats bred specifically for the shooting of this scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade? You can't use just any ol' rats because any ol' rats are, you may have heard, stuffed with plague. This does beg the question -- what happened to all of these rats after filming? But I'm sure they all got sent to happy rat homes to live out their happy rat lives. And at least they used fake/animatronic rats for the big fireball moment.

Anyway apparently Spielberg used the same company here for his rats that he got the snakes from for Raiders and the "critters" from for Temple of Doom -- I love that the nightmare menagerie of Temple is so varied they can't be more specific. Temple's always been my favorite film of the Indy films and a big part of it is the wealth and breadth of "critters" -- the bug scene freaks me out more than almost any scene ever put on screen. And of course by the fourth film they were using CG for their "critters" -- that ant attack which is nowhere near on par with any of the earlier ones. Use real critters, dammit! 

This does beg the question -- what animals will attack in the proposed fifth Indiana Jones movie, supposedly coming our way if movies start getting made again before Harrison Ford is really for real too old? I had three thoughts -- spiders, wolves, and piranha. Spiders have popped up here and there but you could give them a spotlight of their own and I would tremble in terror. And obviously it depends on where in the world the next movie takes place, but they usually always make it to a desert or jungle. So if they're in a cold place, do wolves! Just please use real ones. We can tell the damn difference.

As for Crusade's Venetian Catacombs rat scene one thing I love about this is the way they worked it into the script that Indiana's father Henry (Sean Connery) -- and ask me sometime to do my impression of Sean Connery in this movie, I have got it down pat -- is the one terrified of rats, and that he'd have never made it through this gauntlet; that's how you keep character arcs wound up with silly little beats of action in meaningful ways. But then I think Crusade is really underrated... or it was, at least, before Crystal Skull came along. Maybe we can see what an actually bad Indiana Jones movie actually looks like now? Also justice for Alison Doody -- she didn't have rats in his goddamned hair for your bullshit!

13 Rats of Halloween #7

I always make a random new-to-me discovery or two when I do my "13 [Blanks] of Halloween" lists every year, and this year it's proving no different with our look at the Rats of Cinemas Past -- like who the hell knew there was a scene in the second Fast and the Furious movie (still hilariously titled 2 Fast 2 Furious) where the bad guy (played by the ever threateningly pretty Cole Hauser)...

... threatened an undercover cop (played by the ever threateningly hirsute-headed Mark Boone Junior) by trapping a rat inside a champagne bucket and holding it down to his chest while he then lit it the fuck up with a blowtorch? I sure didn't! But then I have never seen a single Furious film out of the what, dozen now, so I wouldn't have. Anyway in any case it's nice to see Paul Walker and Tyreese squirming on a sofa real close to one another, even if under such grotesque circumstances -- I'll take what I can get.