NOT Available on DVD: WILLARD and BEN

Hollywood saw a rash of ‘animals on the rampage’ movies in the 1970’s including ones about frogs (FROGS in 1972), snakes (STANLEY also 1972) and even rabbits (NIGHT OF THE LEPUS in 1974). Though the conventions were in part established by THE BIRDS in 1963, it was the runaway success of the 1971 shocker WILLARD, about a nerd’s retaliation against his tormentors with the help of an army of rats, which really ignited the genre. WILLARD spawned the quickie sequel BEN the next year, but surprisingly neither is available on DVD.

Based on the novel ‘The Ratman’s Notebooks’ by Stephen Gilbert, WILLARD tells the story of Willard Stiles (Bruce Davison), a lonely young man employed at the company his late father founded, who suffers cruel humiliations at the hands of his boss (Ernest Borgnine), who’s also dad’s former business partner. Willard’s only companion is his ailing, decrepit mother (Elsa Lanchester) with whom he lives in their dilapidated family mansion. When scores of rats make their home in the house’s drained swimming pool, Willard seeks solace in their company. Socrates, the one white rat of the bunch, becomes his best friend, and together they teach the other rats fun tricks. Things take a dark turn when a mean alpha-male rat named Ben joins the fold and wants Willard’s affections for himself. Willard’s mother dies and Borgnine’s bully tendencies lead him to murder Socrates, prompting Willard to use his rodent buddies to even the score. Willard’s control over his rat army eventually begins to break down, as does his tenuous grasp on sanity and WILLARD climaxes with a deadly power struggle between Willard and Ben.

Like millions of others, I saw WILLARD at the theatres in 1971. It was the must-see hit of the summer of 1971 thanks to a savvy advertising campaign that played up the horror elements of the film. Yet except for two brief scenes of rat-on-human violence, both appearing in the film’s final 10 minutes, WILLARD isn’t much of a horror film at all but rather a tragic character study in which the horrors are the way Willard is treated by others. WILLARD was directed in a rather pedestrian manner by Daniel Mann, best know for women’s dramas such as BUTTERFIELD 8 and COME BACK LITTLE SHEBA, but it didn’t need gothic style to speak to teen audiences who could relate to the generational conflict between the put-upon Willard and his persecuting elders. Willard was the quintessential pathetic dweeb with that whole repressed rage thing going on and 25-year-old Davison was perfect in the sympathetic title role. The relationship between Willard and his rats is both scary and oddly endearing, not unlike Davison’s quirky performance that calls to mind Tony Perkins’ Norman Bates. He’s wimpy and insecure as the film opens but his rat friends help him grow a spine and his rallying cry of “Tear him apart!” when the heartless Borgnine finally gets his, must have had audiences cheering for the underdog. Veterans Elsa Lanchester and Ernest Borgnine ham it up in WILLARD, sinking their teeth into their colorful roles. Borgnine plays it especially mean and his screaming during his bloody comeuppance is a highlight. In one of her earliest roles, sexy Sondra Locke plays a potential love interest for Willard, but her character has nowhere to go. The surprise success of WILLARD spawned the inevitable sequel BEN, which was rushed into theatres the following year.

BEN (1972) picks up the story immediately after Willard’s death. The police search his house but are unable to find the rats, lead by Ben, which have escaped into the sewers. Ben befriends Danny Garrison (Lee Montgomery), a lonely 13 year old boy with heart disease who soon comes to regard the rodent as his closest playmate. Meanwhile the rest of the rats are conducting increasingly daring raids on the neighborhood in search of food and the police begin a massive campaign to rid the city of them. When it is discovered that Danny is hiding the ringleader, pressure is placed on him to divulge the whereabouts of the rats’ hiding place. Ben became violent when the town folks used pesticide to kill his friends. Eventually, the authorities destroy most of the rat colony, while others are sent to testing labs. Ben however, survives and BEN closes with Danny tending to his badly injured friend.

BEN wasn’t nearly as good, or successful as WILLARD. It can’t make up its mind whether it wants to be a horror film or a melodramatic tearjerker about a sick little boy, so it tries to be both. Where WILLARD was an edgy revenge fantasy, BEN was a cloying exercise in sentiment. Willard may have been an outcast but BEN’s Danny is not only a lonely kid who gets picked on, but he has a bad heart and has to have dangerous operations just to stay alive. Apparently this affliction prevents him from having any friends so he works in his enormous playroom building marionette theatres (more complex than the ones John Cusack made in BEING JOHN MALKOVICH) and writing horrible songs. And poor Ben, the once-ferocious beast who ordered his rat army to eat Willard alive in the original, becomes a cuddly, bully-nibbling pet in BEN. The weepy Danny kisses Ben in the sewer, makes mushy faces at him, and holds him close to the open scar on his chest. It’s all so nauseatingly maudlin; I started to wish the rats would turn on him like they did their previous master. In one infamously awful scene, Danny idly composes a song on the piano for his rodent friend. That song, ‘Ben’, was nominated for an Oscar and is sung by a12-year old Michael Jackson during the film’s closing credits. It’s not a bad song when Jackson sings it (it was his first number-one solo hit) but squinty Lee Montgomery, always on the verge of tears, lacks any appeal (the Medved Brothers named him ‘Worst Child Actor’ for this film and 1976’s BURNT OFFERINGS in their book ‘The Golden Turkey Awards’) and his warbling rendition is painful. Meredith Baxter plays Danny’s older sister and Joseph Campanella a sympathetic cop but these parts are small. Much of the climax, with the rats being shot with high-pressure hoses and scorched with flamethrowers as the police move through the sewers, is exciting and there’s a great attack on a supermarket scene, but too much of the movie is this poignant sub-Disney story of a boy and his rat. BEN, with it’s collection of 70 kitsch and fashions, has dated worse than the more timeless WILLARD and it was not nearly as big a hit with audiences.

WILLARD was remade in 2003 by director Glen Morgan (who also remade BLACK CHRISTMAS in 2006) more as a black comedy. The plot was identical but the tone was completely different with the horror elements played up in a gothic, Tim Burton-esque style. Crispin Glover, natch, was cast in the title role and his perversely goofy charisma fit the part perfectly, though he’s actually creepier than the rats and far less sympathetic than Davison. In clever nods to the 70’s films, Glover hums the ‘Ben’ theme while his cat is devoured by rats and a framed photo of Willard’s dad in the remake is actually that of an aged Bruce Davison! Both WILLARD and BEN were released on VHS in the 1980’s but, as of these writing, remains MIA on DVD.