After 15 years of hit movies, Abbott and Costello departed from Universal studios in the twilight of their partnership with 1955's Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy, the last of their monster comedies. Decked out in desert safari gear, the boys go looking for a job with an Egyptologist and wind up in the middle of a conspiracy concerning the murdered professor, an ancient mummy, and a magical medallion that, true to form, bumbling Costello manages to eat for dinner. Marie Windsor, the boss lady of a gang of treasure-hunting crooks, dresses in a harem outfit to vamp for our chubby little hero, and the eternally stiff Richard Deacon hilariously plays the leader of an Egyptian mummy cult like a high school principal decked out for Halloween. Directed by longtime collaborator Charles Lamont, it's a typical Abbott and Costello farce with disappearing corpses, mistaken identities and wacky word plays ("Take your pick" riffs on "Who's on first" with garden tools). While not as clever or spirited as their original monster mash Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, the vaudeville veterans are still masters of the double-take and fast-talk patter, and the picture climaxes with a screwball chase that involves not one, not two, but three mummies skittering through the phoniest looking pyramid this side of community theatre. You were expecting realism? The boys appeared together once more on film, in Dance with Me, Henry, and then split up. -Sean Axmaker, Amazon. com.

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. [+]

If Franz Kafka had been an animator and film director-oh, and a member of Monty Python's Flying Circus-this is the sort of outrageously dystopian satire one could easily imagine him making. However, Brazil was made by Terry Gilliam, who is all of the above except, of course, Franz Kafka. Be that as it may, Gilliam sure captures the paranoid-subversive spirit of Kafka's The Trial (along with his own Python animation) in this bureaucratic nightmare-comedy about a meek governmental clerk named Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce) whose life is destroyed by a simple bug. Not a software bug, a real bug (no doubt related to Kafka's famous Metamorphosis insect) that gets smooshed in a printer and causes a typographical error unjustly identifying an innocent citizen, one Mr. Buttle, as suspected terrorist Harry Tuttle (Robert De Niro). When Sam becomes enmeshed in unravelling this bureaucratic glitch, he himself winds up labelled as a miscreant. The movie presents such an unrelentingly imaginative and savage vision of 20th-century bureaucracy that it almost became a victim of small-minded studio management itself-until Gilliam surreptitiously screened his cut for the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, who named it the best movie of 1985 and virtually embarrassed Universal into releasing it. -Jim Emerson If Franz Kafka had been an animator and film director-oh, and a member of Monty Python's Flying Circus-Brazil is the sort of outrageously dystopian satire one could easily imagine him making. In fact it was made by Terry Gilliam, who is all of the above except, of course, Franz Kafka. Be that as it may, Gilliam captures the paranoid-subversive spirit of Kafka's The Trial (along with his own Python animation) in this bureaucratic nightmare-comedy about a meek government clerk named Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce) whose life is destroyed by a simple bug. [+]