Willard (1971)
Neurotic weakling Willard (Bruce Davison) lives with his overbearing mother (Elsa Lanchester) and her equally overbearing friends, and works for sleazy Mr. Martin (Ernest Borgnine) who stole his father’s business. While failing to do his chores, he meets, and slowly bonds with some rats in his backyard. The bond becomes closer and closer, particularly with two unusually intelligent rats, the friendly and submissive Socrates and the more independent Ben. Willard begins to use the rats, first for pranks, then for a robbery, and finally for revenge. But the important word is “use” as Willard is selfish and petty and Ben in smarter than he realizes.
The Birds started the “animal horror” movement, but Willard set it blazing. However, Willard isn’t like The Birds or the films that came after. It isn’t really horror. In other films, the animals are either evil, or represent nature repaying man for his foolishness. The animals rarely have personalities. But here, the rats are the heroes. With the exception of the office temp (Sondra Locke), every human is scum. They are universally cruel and self-serving and most are cowardly. You want them punished. But no matter how horrible they all are, Willard is the worst. After all, Martin only hurts people in his way. Willard turns on his friends.
The rats are loyal and good. They elicit sympathy, and Ben is the best of them (it doesn’t hurt that he’s the one rat that is photographed well—I have to give credit to the animal handler and cameraman, though in most films I’d be lauding the great acting for the performance that ends up on screen). Ben is the one I cared about.
The development of the rats as characters, as well as the relationships between rats and Willard, play out better in the book, “Ratman’s Notebooks.” Such things need time and that isn’t available on screen, whereas the book could dig deep into Socrates, Ben, and Willard. But Bruce Davison is excellent as the sniveling man-child and the scenes with Ben work well enough to sell the idea.
The rest of the cast is good, and while the picture drags a bit, the big moments really work.
It was followed by Ben.
Ben (1972)
Ben, the lead rat from Willard, picked up tens of thousands of followers in the 10 seconds between it and its prequel. Now he has an army of rats to feed, which is hard work, and involves breaking into grocery stores and trucks. It’s made harder by the police who are dealing with the dead bodies left from the previous film. Ben runs into Danny (Lee Montgomery), a kid with a heart condition, who lives with his nondescript mother (Rosemary Murphy) and kind sister (Meredith Baxter before Family Ties). They become fast friends, with Danny diverting the police.
Ben is mainly remembered for the top 10 Michael Jackson theme song. You don’t hear many ballads to rats. In movie, Danny supposedly comes up with it while sitting at a piano early in the film, dwelling on how swell it is to have a rat friend.
It’s an odd movie. It dives into the killer rat concept, with lots of bodies and screaming people, but the rats are still where my sympathy lay. The humans are generic, only a few getting names. They aren’t evil like in Willard, so I didn’t want them to die, at least at first. The horror element doesn’t work with friendly rats and unknown victims. By the end I wasn’t against the humans simply on the basis that they were against the rats.
And I’ve no explanation for the odd crowds. Outside of Willard’s house, and by the supermarket, and by the truck crash, there’s large silent crowds. They come from nowhere and just stand there, watching. If this was an Italian film I’d assume they were meant to be ghosts or otherwise unreal. No one interacts with them. This would be a better film if they were surrealistic.
So it’s lacking the personal drama of Willard, as well as the frights of a flick with sympathetic victims and vicious monsters. But it is still entertaining. The child is far less annoying than is the norm in horror films, and I actually cared about the sister (she’s never a potential victim). And the rats are fantastic, particularly Ben. Once again, all the best shots and emotional moments belong to the big black rat.
I wish they’d have been willing to go the pure cult route, and make this a film where we could happily cheer as rats massacred people. But as it, there’s a bit of ratty fun, and Michael Jackson singing lovingly:
Ben, you’re always running here and there
You feel you’re not wanted anywhere
If you ever look behind and don’t like what you find
There’s something you should know, you’ve got a place to go
