Oct. 17, 2006 - Issue #574: Ten Days on Earth
Custom car doc is Rat Fink cool, but needs to adjust comic-timing belt
You’ve probably seen the Rat Fink around; he’s a grotesque green monster-rodent with sharp fangs and protruding eyes. The antithesis of Mickey Mouse, he is the creation of Ed “Big Daddy” Roth—the god of Kustom cars, subversive t-shirts, and making it kool to use the letter “k” instead of “c.”
Roth was a Southern California native whose only skills were art and auto body. He used his talents to twist the zeitgeist, commercializing weirdness. It may seem corny to us now, but when Big Daddy first painted flames on a car hood, or a goblin on a t-shirt, he was really changing the way people looked at their possessions.
Like one of Roth’s Kustom projects, Rat Fink is sculpted in the same way. It is individualized with animated effects, cartoon sequences, and Roth’s floating head, who posthumously uses John Goodman’s voice box as a vessel.
Ed Roth believed that there was more to a car than just an engine; there is also personality. Mann takes this idea one step further and gives the cars voices. Using the talents of Jay Leno, Ann-Margret, Stone Cold Steve Austin—to name a few—the vintage cars tell their history in first person, ruminating on the good old days.
Mann gets a little carried away, and what starts as a clever device becomes poorly scripted monologues where the cars force lame jokes on each other. I never thought I’d say this, but these cars have terrible comic timing. Aside from that, they hardly further the story and are self-indulgent enough to forget about their maker.
This film really could have benefited from a car that specializes in the social sciences. It speculates too much, and perhaps credits Big Daddy more than necessary. To say that his work inspired Bart Simpson, Chewbacca and iMacs is a bit of an overstatement. It is an essay turned opinion article.
Ron Mann can make almost anything cool, and with Rat Fink, he shouldn’t have to try very hard. But he does, and somewhere between a car asking women to sit on its hood, and Rat Fink landing on the moon, he forgets that documentaries are supposed to educate. While it can be highly ornamented and entertaining, it’s the information that is most tantalizing. V Sat, Oct 21 - Mon, Oct 23 (7 pm)
Tales of the Rat Fink
Directed by Ron Mann
Written by Soloman Vesta
Voiced by Matt Groening, John Goodman, Ann-Margret
Metro Cinema, $8
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