It's taken some time, but I finally found Willard.
For so long I had only seen the sequel Ben. And what a strange movie Ben was. It involved a small boy befriending a semi-sentient rat who leads a family through the sewers consuming vast amounts of food and occasionally getting involved in the slaughter of some unsuspecting person.
But here we could see all the origins.
And it turns out Ben's not really that prominent.
Now instead we turn to a different little rat called Socrates.
The rat who dared to love!
Or at least that's the idea behind the movie really it's about this weirdo named Willard who befriends a bunch of rats and seems to have some sort of spiritual gifts with them. It's never described as a power or anything but Willard can just talk to rats it seems.
Teach them, lead them and consult with them.
A fair bit of the movie is about Willard trying to keep his home after his whack-a-doodle mother dies.
In fact that's only the strength and the weakness of this movie at the same time.
The casting.
There's not a single 'normal' person in this entire movie.
Everyone's a bit strange, everyone has an automotive and everyone is given the chance to choose the scenery!
In the case of the Rat it's quite literal.
In fact that might be the irony of the movie.
The Rats are the most subdued and skilled actors in the entire film. Oh sure you have Ernest Borgnine playing a skis-bag and pound-for-pound is the best actor in the movie. But even he has to give way to over the top performances and ridiculous dialogue.
And thank God for it.
This movie needed all the wacky oddballs it could get. Otherwise it would just be the slog of mediocrity leading to a few decent rat encounters and really only two deaths.
I'm trying to debate, is this technically better than Ben. The performances are better and the story feels a bit more structured but the actual rat scenes are improved in Ben and at this point he's just more famous.
Now that might have been helped by a Michael Jackson song of the same name.
But still it leads me to debate rather I'd rather watch Willard or Ben. Both are technically fine and they're worth a watch. They're just captivating and strange enough to capture your attention without being so over the top as to make them parody flicks.
As far Oddball characters I'd rather watch Willard himself over the kid from Ben.
Part of that is just down to child actors not being as interesting and kind of annoying but it also helps that Willard just has more of a weird environment to work with and he's actually the driving plot of his story.
Overall Willard isn't bad.
And just like Ben I found myself more emotionally connected to the rats than any of the human characters.
They're Plumb-dumb adorable and sometimes I wish somebody could just make an entire movie revolving around them with no dialogue. Surely somebody could make a captivating rat movie.
I did notice a technical error in this movie which I hadn't seen in Ben. That being a scene towards the end where you can see a reflection of a the Rat handlers in the glass getting captured by the camera.
It's weird because they cut away from that scene before the camera pans over to Ben so it seems like it could have easily have been fixed with just a little editing cut, but whatever doesn't take away from the movie.
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