illard! There are rats in the basement!"
With his mother's words uttered over a blank screen, Willard Stiles (Glover) opens the door into the cellar, where he hears the scurrying of little feet. When he turns on the switch, the lights blow out. Rats!
As if he didn't have enough to worry about. Since his father died, Willard has been sole caretaker of his ailing mother (Jackie Burroughs). And though Willard's father founded Martin-Stiles Manufacturing, the odious Frank Martin (Ermey) now runs it.
Willard still has a job there, under the provisions of the contract that gave Martin full ownership of the firm. But that doesn't mean Martin has to like it. And he humiliates poor Willard at every turn.
When Willard shows up late, as usual, he finds Cathryn (Harring), a beautiful temp worker whom Martin has hired to take Willard's place. "Business is a rat race," Martin yells at Willard. "I will not allow myself to be devoured by all those other rats because of you!"
At home, Willard takes pity on the rats he's supposed to exterminate in the basement. He rescues one white rat, whom he names Socrates. "I will never let anyone hurt you, ever," he promises tenderly.
But there's another rat in town: Ben, a giant gray rodent. "This looks like the beginning of a beautiful friendship," he tells the rat. Eventually, Willard learns that he can control Ben's minions, a swarm of rats that is rapidly overtaking the house. At least, Willard thinks he can control them.
When tragedy strikes, Willard finds himself at Martin's mercy. Cathryn tries to reach out to Willard. But Willard finds solace only with his growing army of rats, which he carries around in two leather briefcases. And Willard begins to believe that only his rats can help save him from Martin's depredations.
These rats will slay
Willard, a remake of the 1971 camp horror classic that introduced Bruce Davison to the movies, comes from longtime genre partners James Wong and Glen Morgan (Final Destination) and marks Morgan's first feature-film directing job. For a modestly budgeted genre movie, Willard emerges as a stylish fable about anger, with rats.
Morgan nibbles at the edges of Alfred Hitchcock territory, with overt homages to the master's Psycho and The Birds. But Morgan's film is much shallower, broader and more stylized. The story, such as it is, is as unadorned as a rat's tail, and it would be too much to say that Willard is anything more than a nicely mounted parable about frustration, isolation and revenge.
There's a lot of black humor. Morgan's script is full of "rat race" jokes; he has taken perverse pleasure in giving humans animal names and animals human names; and the Jackson 5 song "Ben," from the 1972 Willard sequel, makes a surprising and hilarious appearance in a sequence that will have cat lovers squirming. (Davison also gets a shout out, as the image of Willard's long-dead father.)
What emotional weight the movie musters is attributable largely to the twitchy and brave performance by Glover, who apparently threw himself into the role as if it were Hamlet. Dressed funereally in a black suit and white shirt, Glover's Willard Stiles is a quivering, lachrymose bundle of barely contained fury who threatens to spontaneously combust at any moment. But when he utters the film's immortal catchphrase, "Tear him up!", it comes out as a strained whisper, compared with Davison's original shriek. Glover's both off-putting and mesmerizing and altogether worth the price of admission.
Harring, as the girl next door, gets little chance to show off the exotic glamour she displayed in Mulholland Drive. Ermey takes the job originally held by Ernest Borgnine and blusters in the one-dimensional role. It's a relief when he finally gets what's due.
But moviegoers expecting a rodent Grand Guignol may be disappointed. As in the original film, there's hardly any real action, though there's plenty of scurrying rats. The film's more gruesome attack scenes were edited out in favor of a PG-13 rating. And some may find that the movie drags in spots.
