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!