Review of Willard (2003) by Misselana N — 31 Mar 2012

Awwwwwwwwww rats!

Hmmm... Interesting... Hope you're not a cat person.

The Story: A man befriends rats and trains them to do his bidding...There's not much more to it than that. He works at a dead end job, hates his boss, is afraid of everyone, and takes care of his sick mother...While all that other stuff is going on, the film ultimately is about a lonely man using rats to exact revenge on his enemies...It's told with an interesting style, and moves along at a pretty speedy pace. The problem is that it's one of those films where it takes a lot of time for not a lot of stuff. In other words, you might find yourself an hour into it, and wonder where the time went. And there's a few moments in the film that will have you cringing, because you just can't believe what you've just seen. Seriously, some of this film is downright hard to watch and hard to stomache.

The Cast: Crispin Glover, and a couple hundred rats...Crispin Glover is perhaps the most under used actor of all time. You might recognize him from the Back to the Future series, but other than that he's not all that recognized. He's a great actor perfectly cast here, and plays the part of Willard extremely well. He's so accurately creepy, that you might actually find yourself needing to step away a little from the TV, he's that realisticly creepy here. But in the same respect, he's so damned loveable, that you can't help but like him and feel sorry for him. He makes the film great, his acting style is amazing, and his all around appearance is so perfectly creepy...With all that said, there's a couple other cast members that are worth mentioning here...They don't have any real names that I know of, so I'll just call them by their names in the movie. Socrates and Ben...If you're minds moving a little slow and you haven't figured it out by now, than I'll just come right out and say it, Socrates and Ben are both rats. Yes, I know they're rats, not actors but these two rodents take on characteristics of their own that will have you on the edge of your seat. Socrates being the good little white rat, and Ben being the evil grey rodent. The rats are honestly characters unto themselves, that's good story telling when you can make real life rodents main characters.

One to Five Scale: 4.

Okay, so I was completely torn on this one. Give this a 3 or give this a 4. The style, the characters, and the fact that I actually cared about Socrates the good rat and hated Ben the bad rat, make this strange thriller a 4. If you have a fear of rodents stay as far away from this as possible, don't even look at it! If you don't have a fear of rodents than give this one try, it's genuinely creepy and will prove to be worth your time...Just make sure you rent this one, as you might not want to watch it more than once...Yes, it's that screwed up.

Tyler.