How could a movie subvert expectations and meet those expectations at the same time.
Ben is this cheapish killer creature film in where a group of sentient rats go around maiming and killing people. Most of the time it's people trying to discover their location to kill them so they have to kill the person before they can alert the authorities.
But it seems like if they're intelligent rats they might have known better just to move on and find a new location to live.
Anyways I wasn't expecting too much here.
A bunch of rats roaming around, killing people, destroying businesses, eating copious amounts of food.
What I wasn't expecting was a surprisingly decent character dynamic between Ben (the rat) and the protagonist kid with the heart condition.
The second I saw that kid I thought; ''Oh great. We're going to have one of these awful child-centric movies where the rats play second fiddle to this kid and his stupid life problems. The whole thing's going to be a big old sappy family dynamics mixed in with bad child performances.''
But it turned out to be a surprisingly decent little story.
The kid is awkward and the movie can get a little too into the family drama from time to time.
But the rats are never forgotten and they are the focal point of the entire film.
Especially towards the end when the kid and Ben really start connecting.
Ben even takes the kid into the sewers to meet them the rest of his adorably large family.
The last 10 minutes of the film is just a freaking bloodbath of killer rats versus exterminators and policeman with flamethrowers and shotguns.
It gets quite ridiculous.
What I really wasn't expecting was to be in tears at the end of the film.
I'm not talkin laughter.
I'm talking genuine, I feel sad tears.
They've got the theme song beeing sung by a very young Michael Jackson and this distraught kid who's just live through hell and literal fire, wandering back his he's shack.
Only to find Ben barely alive.
This poor kid being overwhelmed with grief and joy trying his best to keep his little rat pal alive with first aid. Saying that no matter what they'll always be friends.
That no one will ever separate them again.
It's silly, it's corny. It's nuts after seeing everything that just happened in the sewers. But it's genuinely sweet.
From a technical aspects the film was all right. Lots of real-life rats all running around. You really do get this sense that the creatures are kind of sentient.
I'm not sure how many rats were injured or killed during the making of the film.
Probably a whole lot given that it's the early seventies and there's just so many rats on screen.
But I don't think anybody went out of their way to hurt any rats or at least any big groups of them during those extermination scenes.
The rats during the flamethrower bits are all super imposed under or over the Flames. So you know there's nothing real getting hurt there.
I do have to chuckle at the film's Betrayal of the rats purposely playing them up is cute and fluffy.
Most creature feature films try to show their monsters as being angry and vicious even when it's just a giant bunny or a hamster on screen.
But Ben doesn't do any of that. It knows its creatures are cute and they uses that to the best of its Advantage.
Especially when you see the little baby rats. I think some of them might have actually been mice but all the same they're just tiny mammals and I was rooting for them the whole way.
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