Featured Creature The Rat File 2: The one with R. Lee Ermey and an illegal alien rat

 

Title: Willard

What Year?: 2003

Classification: Weird Sequel

Rating: What The Hell??? (2/4)

 

With this review, I’m continuing my series within this feature on rodent-based movies, which I probably started at the worst possible time. Nevertheless, I’m forging ahead with the one that gave me the idea for this, though it would already have fit in with my previous and planned reviews of remakes. It gets in here as an example of the range of this especially odd subniche genre. We’ve seen a kid’s movie with The Witches, which was still quite dark. This time, the movie is unquestionably adult, though not quite in a gory or “graphic” way. I present Willard, the remake of a classic/ infamous 1970s film, and I would have liked to say it was better, but as we will see, things aren’t so simple.

Our story begins after a bonkers opening credits sequence with an introduction to Willard, a man living with his elderly mother in a Gothic mansion. In short order, we learn that he is the son of a deceased businessman, reduced to working in a protected pity job under his father’s former business partner. Meanwhile, Willard looks into his options for exterminating a colony of rats in the basement of the estate. But he has a change of heart when he meets a friendly albino rat dubbed Socrates. He soon goes as far as feeding his new friends, though he remains wary of a very large rat he names Ben. Things take a turn for the worse as his mother deteriorates and his boss brings in an attractive temp to do his job. As his life unravels, his rapport with the rodents grows, and he discovers that he can make them do his bidding against those who wronged him. When his boss kills Socrates and schemes to take his job and the house, he sets out to take his revenge. But is he really in control, or is it Ben who rules the horde?

Willard was a 2003 movie written and directed by Glen Morgan, based on the 1971 film of the same name and the 1968 novel The Ratman’s Notebooks by Stephen Gilbert. The film was developed and promoted as a new treatment of the novel and story rather than a direct remake of the original film. The film starred Crispin Glover as the title character and R. Lee Ermey as his boss Mr. Martin, with Laura Harring as the ambiguous love interest Cathryn. The film relied heavily on live animals, including a Gambian pouched rat used to portray Ben. Additional effects were provided by The Character Shop, an animatronics crew whose members contributed to Aliens and Ghostbusters, with some animation/ CGI by Centropolis Effects. The soundtrack was composed by the late Shirley Walker, also a contributor to Dungeommaster and Mystery Men among many other film and TV credits. While the movie was released to mixed to positive reviews, it was a commercial failure, earning $8.5 million against a budget believed to exceed $20M. In the same year the movie was released, the importing of pouched rats into the US was banned, based on concerns about disease and invasive populations, especially in Florida.

For my experiences, I first heard of the original movies Willard and Ben in junior high, both from books on movies and popular works on biology. I loved the ideas and themes enough for homicidal rats to feature in my fiction, but as often happens, I was never that interested in the source material. I did watch the present film not long after it came out, and absolutely loved it at the time. Then, within the last few years, I watched both versions of Willard, and remained impressed enough to buy a copy I used for this review. As alluded, I went in optimistic that that this one would meet the same high standards as most of the ones I have chosen for this feature in particular. It was only as the viewing unfolding that it finally crossed my mind that something is just a little off, and this is exactly the kind of movie where such things take on an “uncanny valley” feel far more bothersome than greater flaws in a lesser production.

Moving forward, one thing that is clear from the start is that this is a film with top-tier talent, beginning with Ms. Walker’s theme, which feels like the composer is trying to be more Danny Elfman than Elfman after using his music as the basis for the Batman cartoon. Naturally, there’s fine performances from Glover and Ermey, who are clearly loving their characters, flaws and all. The supporting cast are generally game, duly sympathetic or increasingly creeped-out by Willard’s deteriorating state. The two characters that are maybe not quite fully developed are Willard’s mother, played by Jackie Burroughs (see… Heavy Metal???), and Cathryn. The mother is mostly just shrill and vaguely oblivious, though her final decline is ghastly. Then the maybe-love interest is a case of too much and not enough. From a little reading, the romantic angle was more of a “thing” in the book than either movie, and it’s hard to avoid concluding that the films made the right decision. Here, the relationship can be considered largely platonic, driven to a rather uncomfortable degree by the lady’s insistence on comforting Willard in his grief, complete with the comically ill-fated cat. She still plays a far more limited role than she’s played up to be, and Ms. Harring, an actual Latin model, just doesn’t fit.

The con, alas, is the rats themselves, and this is what drove me to rate the movie as low as I have. There’s plenty of great scenes that benefit from the old-school effects, especially the destruction of the boss’s car and the demise of the cat. The root problem is that there are way too many things that simply don’t make sense if you know anything about actual rats. Just for example, the movie repeatedly shows the horde spanning halls and whole rooms as they swarm. But, apart from anything else, rats and other rodents normally follow walls and edges, most likely because it keeps their whiskers in contact with a solid surface. To move into the middle of an open space would be the equivalent of stepping from under a street light into a dark alley. (This is also probably why pet rodents of all types relieve themselves in the corners of their cages, which definitely figures in here.) Another symptom is Ben, whose actual species is 2 or 3 times the size of a common brown rat. It’s a fair conceit, especially considering how often Willard comments on his size, but it’s far too easy to see that the animal is free of wounds, disease or even dirt. The most troubling part is that this much deviation from natural behavior would only really happen at population densities virtually as dangerous to the rats as active extermination efforts, which would be a fitting point about Willard’s misguided sympathies if it was made. You can call this overthinking, but these are points I could figure out in 8^th grade, without in any way slowing down a story.

Now it’s time for the “one scene”, and I’m going with one between Glover and Ermey, and unusually, I’m doing this without an extra look. After Willard is notified he is being fired, he barges in on the boss. Martin says, “This is all a misunderstanding,” only it becomes clear he is pointedly ignoring Willard while finishing another conversation on the phone. Once he deigns to pay attention, things quickly heat up as Willard lays out their arrangement: By an agreement made with his father, Mr. Martin can’t fire him. In his own despicable way, the boss quickly makes the case why such “protected” positions are demeaning for all concerned, centered on the simple point, “You hate being here!” Things level off as Willard grows desperate and Martin lays out his real intentions, which he would probably abandon if he knew the conditions at the family mansion. The routine shenanigans don’t diminish a powerful scene between two great actors, which is all too relevant for disability self-advocates like myself.

In closing, I come back not to the rating, but to what I really think of this one. I’m well aware that I am giving it a lower rating than considerably weaker films, especially Starship Troopers 3 and Mimic 2. This is, however, something I have done before with far more reluctance; as usual, the films with greater limitations are simply on a different standard. (Okay, it did feel a little weird giving this one the same rating as Congo…) The fair comparison is with the 1970s Kong, another “good but flawed’ remake, and perhaps A Quiet Place, a mainstream attempt at a monster movie, both of which did get the same rating. The bottom line, you can have a good story, good characters and good creatures, but once you let one go, the others will start to slip accordingly. The result here as elsewhere is a movie that’s good fun to watch once, not so much to come back to. Now, I for one am moving on.