Willard

Providing a shaky bridge between modern horror classics like Night of the Living Dead and The Exorcist, Willard (1971) was a surprise hit in 1971, dropping the traditional supernatural scares and kickstarting the "animal attack" genre that would run rampant throughout the decade. But it's the film's soft-sell approach that helped it go mainstream, substituting honest-to-gosh emotions in place of grindhouse-style gore.

Willard (played to perfection by a young Bruce Davison) is a bit of a pushover, allowing his boss, Mr. Martin (Ernest Borgnine) to work him all hours and his mother (Elsa Lanchester) to smother him with nagging affection. After running across a nest of rats in the backyard, Willard develops a close relationship with the cuddly rodents, particularly a black and white pair he names Ben and Socrates respectively. His new friends are quick learners and big eaters. With tax payments looming and his job on the line, Willard soon realizes that his rats could be more than just pets...they could be a weapon!

Director Daniel Mann's film, based on the novel Ratman's Notebooks, is the sort of slow, character-based thriller studios specialized in at the time. It often feels like an expanded episode of Night Gallery with its minimal locations and obvious sets. But as the noose tightens around Willard, audience anticipation grows. What seemed like wasted moments watching him bond with his menagerie of furry friends pays off in a big way during the climax featuring the famous line - "Tear him up!" - as Willard takes his revenge.

In a pre-CGI world, the film offers up an impressive amount of animal trickery, only showing its age with a few cases of obvious "rat tossing" happening off-screen. Of course, Borgnine's character is the biggest rat of them all, creating one of the best-worst bosses to ever hit the screen. But Davison matches him beat for beat, providing hope to all those little guys with dreams of getting even...with a little help from their friends.

Released just one year later, Ben (1972) is a misguided sequel from the word go, adding more shock value (we get several rat attacks right after the opening credits) but countering with a cute 8-year-old protagonist with a penchant for songwriting and puppet shows. More memorable for its kitschy theme song performed by Michael Jackson than anything else, the film mixes sappy sentimentality with a ravenous rodent horde while still finding time to work in a few musical numbers. It's MST3K material all the way.

Danny (Lee Montgomery) is a precocious kid with a heart condition that keeps him cooped up inside with his sister (Meredith Baxter of Family Ties). But when Ben, Willard's second-favorite pet rat, shows up on his windowsill, on the run from a team of exterminators, Danny bonds with his new furry pal almost immediately. Police and health officials, hunting down the surviving rats as they pop up in various homes, stores and health spas throughout the city, start going door to door in an effort to destroy the pests. This sends Danny on the run to protect his pal, culminating in a sewer showdown straight out of 1954's Them!

How Ben manages to louse up everything Willard got right is nearly inexplicable. But as a piece of so-bad-it's-good filmmaking, there's a lot here to enjoy. The puppet showtunes alone (young star Lee Montgomery had previously worked on Disney's Million Dollar Duck) are B-movie gold. But nearly every piece of dialogue seems made for Rocky Horror-style audience wisecracks to be inserted. Meredith Baxter is convincingly cute in the surrogate mother role - and has great chemistry with Montgomery - but the rest of the cast are upstaged by their four-legged co-stars in nearly every scene.

Released separately by horror specialists Scream Factory, both films have been packaged as Blu-ray / DVD combos with a matching set of extras: actor Bruce Davison provides and interview and audio commentary on Willard while Lee Montgomery does the same on Ben. But the transfers themselves are quite different. Willard looks flat-out amazing, with a dramatic boost in color and clarity. While Ben, due to a lack of original negatives, had to be sourced from the best available print. It's not a washout, but viewed back-to-back, the difference is like night and day. A nostalgic collection of still, trailers, TV and radio spots wrap up the package.