Willard (1971) and Ben (1972)

I finally managed to get around to watching a double bill of killer rat movies over the weekend.  Not just any killer rat movies, but the killer rat movies: Willard (1971) and Ben (1972).  I'd actually caught parts of both films a few weeks ago on the Kino Cult streaming channel.  Having lost access, however, to this stream, I was pleased to find that both films had now turned up on an on-demand channel that hasn't so far disappeared from Roku amid copyright disputes.  Both films are very much of their era in their depictions of suburban America with direction that is solid rather than inspired and production values slightly above those of contemporary TV movies. Willard was pitched less as a horror movie than as a psychological character study.  Indeed, both films focus on lonely, isolated individuals who, for varying reasons, find it difficult to form relationships with other human beings, instead turning to rats for companionship and, certainly in the case of Willard, a substitute family.  The titular Willard, played by Bruce Davison, is a young man caught between a domineering sick mother at home and a bullying boss at work.  The situation complicated by the fact that Willard's father had founded the firm he works at, but, according to his mother, been cheated out of control of it by Willard's boss, Al Martin (Ernest Borgnine), with Willard only being employed there as a condition of the takeover.  From early on, it is clear that Willard has no actual friends of his own - everyone attending his birthday party are his mother's friends - and is obviously bullied and isolated at work.  He has no life between work and looking after his mother, although he manages to establish a stumbling, tentative friendship with a temp (Sondra Locke) brought in to help him.  

Willard finds solace observing a colony of rats living in the garden that his mother wants him to kill, gradually establishing a relationship with them and befriending a white rat he names Socrates.  When his mother dies, he moves the rats into the house and continues to train them to obey his commands.  Socrates is joined by a black rat, Ben, as a leader of the pack and Willard starts to use them to disrupt a party at his boss's house and rob a client to obtain the money he needs to pay some back taxes and thereby avoid the house being foreclosed upon.  During all of this, Willard increasingly isolates himself from his mother's friends and acquaintances and work mates, (with the exception of Sondra Locke).  Taking Socrates and Ben secretly into the office with him ends in disaster when Socrates is seen and killed by Martin.  Willard reacts by confronting Martin at the office out of hours and setting Ben and the other rats on him.  With Martin and his best friend Socrates dead, Willard sees the opportunity for a new life, abandoning Ben and drowning the rats remaining at his house, he hopes to embark on a relationship with the girl from the office, (his confidence having been boosted by having proven to himself that he could develop relationships outside of his mother's circle through his befriending of Socrates and the other rats).  A vengeful Ben, however, turns up with the other rats from the attack on Martin and set upon Willard at his house.

Willard turned out to be successful enough to warrant an immediate sequel.  Despite a lack of gore and featuring only two fatal rat attacks, Willard appealed primarily to horror film audiences so, naturally, any sequel was inevitably going to ramp up these elements.  At the same time, the producers were obviously keenly aware that the relationship between the rats and the main protagonist were a key factor in the film's success.  The idea of an under trodden and bullied individual gaining revenge upon his tormentors and oppressors via, not a supernatural, but quite natural force in the form of a rack pat, had undoubted appeal, feeding into the latent revenge and power fantasies of many audience members.  The problem with Willard, though, was that the title character was not, in himself, hugely sympathetic - a weak and indecisive character who, although a grown man, frequently acts like a child.  The obvious answer was to make the main character of the sequel an actual child, one isolated not by bullying or a dysfunctional family, but illness.  It also helped the new film over another hurdle - that the surviving main rat character, Ben, was the least likeable of the rats, portrayed as being jealous of Willard's relationship with Socrates and also being the most aggressive and vicious of the pack.  By having him befriend a sick kid, he instantly becomes more sympathetic. Another crucial difference between the two films is that the boy himself never actually directs the rats to do anything - led by Ben, they are now autonomously raiding supermarkets and chocolate factories in their quest for food, attacking anyone who tries to stop them or threatens the pack.

Ben truly is a direct sequel to Willard, quite literally picking up where that film left off: the scenes of Willard's demise are replayed under the opening titles.  After this, the action switches to the scene outside, with a police cordon holding off gathered onlookers - including the sick kid, his older sister and mother - back from the scene.  Two plots - the budding bromance between the lonely boy and Ben ad the police's attempts to track down Ben and locate the rats' nest - then develop in parallel, coming together at the climax as the boy tries to warn Ben of the impending police attack on the sewers where the pack is hiding out.  The climactic police assault on the sewers includes some brutal images of rats being variously shot, burned with flamethrowers and drowned.  These scenes, along with the numerous fatal rat attacks throughout the film, puts Ben more firmly in the horror genre than its predecessor.  Despite the climactic carnage, the final scene shows an injured Ben making his way back to the boy, who starts tending to his wounds - at which point, with everything set up for another sequel, the sickly sounds of the Michael Jackson theme song cuts in.  Although successful, there were no further sequels, which was undoubtedly a good thing as the two films had just about covered all the angles you could get from the scenario. 

It has to be said that, while entertaining, Ben is still an inferior film to Willard.  For one thing, it suffers from the absence of performers like Bruce Davison, Ernest Borgnine, Elsa Lanchester and Sondra Locke, all of whom had put in excellent performances in the first film.  While.in the sequel, Lee Montgomery Harcourt is fine as the boy and Meredith Baxter does her best in the underdeveloped role of his sister, of the supporting cast, only Joseph Campanella, playing yet another harassed cop, really stands out.  Perhaps the biggest weakness of the sequel is the way in which the relationship between the boy and Ben is portrayed - it is far too cloying and sentimental. lacking the sinister edge of Willard's relationship with his rat friends.  In the final analysis, both films remain enjoyable and I well remember the impact they had on their release in the early seventies, (I was far too young to see them then and somehow missed their TV outings).  Their focus on rats - an animal omnipresent in modern human civilisation - as their 'monster' at a time when werewolves and vampires still abounded in horror films, along with their contemporary settings, made them feel not just plausible, but also made them somewhat groundbreaking.  Arguably, their success helped pave the way for the many 'eco-horror' and 'revenge of nature' movies that followed during the seventies.