Gnaw!

My first big adventure to Europe came too quickly down to earth—after the overnight to Heathrow, the layover in London, and that morning flight to Düsseldorf—when I found myself in my cousin’s living room in the middle of the night, wide awake watching Canadian horror films dubbed into German, the kind of movie in which the Canadian Film Development Corporation and the Royal Bank share the production credit, where tired Hollywood stars go to pad their résumés and prepare for a comeback, or in this case where Richard Chamberlain and John Houseman co-starred in Tod aus dem Telefon.

The second part of this unique double bill was Die Stunde der Ratte in which a growth hormone is inadvertently released into the city sewers. But not only was this gem filmed in Toronto, it actually included someone I knew in the cast. My first night on the European continent, and here I was apologizing for some of the worst films ever to come out of Canada. I’d travelled 4000 miles over two days to have the first thing I saw on television be the city I’d left behind and my pal Robert Kennedy being eaten by a giant rat.