WILLARD (US - 1971) Directed by Daniel Mann. Written by Gilbert A. Ralston. Cast: Bruce Davison, Ernest Borgnine, Sondra Locke, Elsa Lanchester, Michael Dante, Jody Gilbert, William Hansen, John Myhers, J. Pat O'Malley, Joan Shawlee, Alan Baxter, Sherry Presnell. (PG, 95 mins) A surprise sleeper smash for Cinerama Releasing in the summer of 1971, WILLARD, from the masters of horror at Bing Crosby Productions, has been out of circulation for a number of years but has resurfaced, along with its sequel BEN, on Blu-ray courtesy of Shout! Factory. To those under 30, WILLARD has probably been supplanted by the minor cult following of its over-the-top 2003 remake, but for Gen Xers and older--those fortunate enough to have seen it theatrically or on one of its many TV airings as kids throughout the '70s and '80s--the original WILLARD remains one of the most beloved horror films of its day. It's creepy enough to make you squirm and give everyone the willies, but carries a PG (or GP at the time) rating that allowed it to have a huge impact on kids who were actually allowed to see it. It also helped that everyone at some point in their lives probably felt like Willard Stiles, the slumped-shouldered sad sack played by Bruce Davison in the role for which the veteran character actor is best known, even with a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination for 1990's LONGTIME COMPANION. Endlessly picked on at work by his cruel, bullying boss Al Martin (an essential Ernest Borgnine performance) and never given a moment of peace at home by his needy, domineering mother Henrietta (Elsa Lanchester), Willard is a ticking time bomb looking for a way out. He has no friends and his birthday party is attended only by his mother's elderly friends who start in on him about how he needs to stand up to Martin, a conniving asshole who co-owned a foundry with Willard's late father only to muscle him out of the partnership and stress him into an early grave. Martin kept Willard on the payroll as a consolation prize for being screwed out of co-ownership, putting him in sales accounting, dumping everyone else's work on him and forcing him to come in on weekends in the hopes that he'll quit. Willard's only joy in life comes from a family of rats he finds in the backyard. He spends all of his free time with them, playing with them and teaching them tricks, eventually getting them to understand voice commands and perhaps even developing a kind of psychological connection with them. He bonds with two in particular: good-natured and playful white rat Socrates and clingy and vaguely sinister black rat Ben.
Willard soon devotes all of his time to the rats, especially after his mother dies. He moves the fertile rat pack, which has grown exponentially, into the basement, where he has a hard time corralling and controlling them. He ignores the attention given to him by shy, pretty co-worker Joan (Sondra Locke, several years before hooking up with Clint Eastwood) and begins using the rats to plot vengeance against his tormentors. Director Daniel Mann (THE ROSE TATTOO, BUTTERFIELD 8, OUR MAN FLINT) and veteran TV writer Gilbert A. Ralston (BEN CASEY), working from Stephen Gilbert's 1969 novel Ratman's Notebooks, play a little coy with the horror element for a good chunk of the film's running time, whether it's the lighthearted, cute antics of the rats or the completely, almost sarcastically inappropriate score, which sounds like it belongs in a cheerful, uplifting kids movie. Willard just seems shy, lonely, and unable to stand up for himself until his dark side takes over. First it's relatively harmless pranks like setting some rats loose at a swanky work party hosted by Martin that everyone was invited to except Willard, who was nevertheless put in charge of mailing the invitations. But before long, he's using the rats as a decoy to stage a theft of some cash at the home of Martin's sleazy new business partner (Alan Baxter) and eventually, after bringing Socrates and Ben to work with him only to have Martin kill Socrates after he's spotted in the supply closet, training them to attack under the newly-assumed leadership of Ben. It's about 2/3 of the way through WILLARD before its shift to outright horror, and the much talked-about scene where Willard finally exacts his revenge on Martin by bringing along a few thousand of his friends ("Tear him up!" a wild-eyed Willard commands) was the kind of cathartic, crowd-pleasing entertainment that helped make WILLARD such a huge word-of-mouth hit.
WILLARD's inspired willingness to go off the rails in the home stretch makes it especially endearing all these years later. With his mother gone and Martin no longer around to make his life miserable, Willard is finally free and doesn't need his rodent friends anymore. But Ben, feeling rejected on an almost-FATAL ATTRACTION level, won't be ignored, and the scene where Willard's romantic dinner with Joan is interrupted when he spots Ben on the mantle stink-eye squinting at him in a jealous, silent rage is absolute genius. WILLARD inspired one direct ripoff with 1972's STANLEY, about a PTSD-stricken Vietnam vet (Chris Robinson) who trains his pet rattlesnake to take out his enemies, but can be seen in retrospect as a loose precursor to two later 1970s trends: the "nature run amok" (JAWS, GRIZZLY, THE FOOD OF THE GODS, etc) and the "social outcast exacting telepathic revenge" subgenres (CARRIE and JENNIFER--the latter about a teenage girl with both CARRIE-like powers and an ability to control snakes, starring Lisa Pelikan, who was married to Davison for many years--as well as popular made-for-TV-movies like THE SPELL and THE INITIATION OF SARAH). What helps WILLARD a lot is the genuinely terrific performance by Davison, who sells the character much the way Anthony Perkins did with Norman Bates in PSYCHO. Sure, there's the similarities in that they're both sheltered mama's boys, but like Norman Bates, you sympathize with Willard until he starts crossing lines. Norman Bates got off easy by getting to spend two decades in an institution for his crimes. Willard Stiles wasn't so lucky: he made the mistake of fucking with Ben.
WILLARD opening in Toledo, OH on July 2, 1971
BEN (US - 1972) Directed by Phil Karlson. Written by Gilbert A. Ralston. Cast: Joseph Campanella, Arthur O'Connell, Meredith Baxter, Lee Harcourt Montgomery, Rosemary Murphy, Kaz Garas, Kenneth Tobey, Paul Carr, Richard Van Fleet, James Luisi, Norman Alden. (PG, 94 mins) In theaters less than 12 months after WILLARD, the quickie sequel BEN looks and feels even more like a made-for-TV movie than its predecessor, a vibe enhanced by the presence of TV stalwarts like Joseph Campanella and a young Meredith Baxter in leading roles, both of whom accumulating only a small handful of big-screen credits over their long careers (unless I'm mistaken, BEN is the only time Campanella headlined a theatrical release). Stepping in for Daniel Mann was veteran journeyman Phil Karlson, whose directing career dated back to Charlie Chan and Bowery Boys programmers in the 1940s and included some westerns and film noir in the 1950s and Dean Martin's Matt Helm movies in the 1960s. Karlson's biggest success would come 30 years into his career with his next-to-last film when, right after BEN, he directed the surprise 1973 blockbuster WALKING TALL, with Joe Don Baker in his signature role as ass-kicking, hickory-clubbing Sheriff Buford Pusser. Karlson came from the "Let's just get it in the can and move on" school of no-nonsense efficiency, but things get off to a shaky start with an awkward and stilted opening with a bunch of people standing as silent and still as a freeze frame outside the home of Willard Stiles, with BEN picking up immediately after the events of WILLARD. Willard's body has been found in the attic following the Ben-orchestrated revenge attack on him. Dogged detectives Kirtland (Campanella) and Greer (Kaz Garas) find Willard's diary, where he details his training of an army of rats, but the incredulous cops are quick to dismiss it as the rantings of a kook since the rats are nowhere to be found. That's because Ben has directed them to hide in the walls undetected, and while the detectives bicker with cigar-chomping newshound Hatfield (Arthur O'Connell), Ben waits patiently to lead them to a safe place. The safe place turns out to be the sewer, from which Ben and a few other scouts emerge to befriend lonely Danny (Lee Harcourt Montgomery), a frail eight-year-old with a weak heart who lives in Willard's neighborhood. Like Willard, Danny has no friends and spends his time putting on marionette shows in the garage, converted into a workshop/playroom by his single mom Beth (Rosemary Murphy) and big sister Eve (Baxter). Danny and Ben bond immediately, with Ben doing for Danny exactly what he did for Willard when he leads a rat attack on a neighborhood bully who's picking on Danny. Meanwhile, Kirtland and Hatfield are scouring the city for the rat army, though who knows what they intend to do when they find it?
BEN wasn't as big of a hit was WILLARD, though it was just as ubiquitous on late-night TV in the '70s and '80s. With the killer rat angle already established, BEN is able to get right to the horror element and as such, it follows a template not unlike later slasher films like HALLOWEEN, with Ben and the rats terrorizing a small suburban town and going back into hiding, pursued by cops and the media, both of whom have little success in catching them as the body count escalates. Again scripted by Gilbert A. Ralston, BEN manages to be simultaneously more nasty and grisly and more maudlin and silly than WILLARD. There's some amusing scenes like rats invading a health spa and walking on treadmills and an absolutely ludicrous shot of Ben and a few other rats peeking out of the sewer with their eyes fixated on the display window of a nearby cheese shop, not to mention the fact that while Danny speaks and Ben squeaks, they're both able to understand each other perfectly ("Which way, Ben? Left or right?" Danny asks, to which Ben replies with a series of short squeaks. "OK, left!" Danny somehow concludes). But elsewhere, it goes bigger and grosser. There's several times the number of rats here than in WILLARD and Karlson really likes going for lingering shots of them swarming over a victim, putting several cast members in visibly unpleasant situations (Eve ends up looking for Danny in the sewer, and Baxter proves herself a real sport by crawling through all sorts of wet gunk and piles of live rats in the glory days of pre-CGI), or taking over a grocery store to the point where literally the entire floor is covered in large rats climbing all over one another. Young Montgomery, who would go on to be a regular presence in '70s horror cult classics like BURNT OFFERINGS (1976) and in the terrifying "Bobby" segment of the TV-movie DEAD OF NIGHT (1977), is pretty hard to take as the whiny Danny, but he's boldly fearless when it comes to working and physically interacting with his rodent co-stars. BEN could use more smartass banter between seasoned pros Campanella and O'Connell and less of Montgomery's Danny and his marionette song and dance productions, but kids ended up digging WILLARD, so they had to make BEN appeal to that audience. That appeal went so far as getting 13-year-old Michael Jackson to record the title song, a heartwarming ballad about a young boy and his best friend who happens to be a super intelligent, insanely possessive, serial-killing rodent. Titled "Ben" but generally known as "Ben's Song," Jackson's theme song ultimately ended up being more popular than the movie it was from, becoming his first chart-topping solo hit and scoring a Best Original Song Oscar nomination, losing to Maureen McGovern's "The Morning After" from THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE. Yes, BEN is an Oscar-nominated film.
THE MESSENGER (Italy - 1987) Directed by Fred Williamson. Written by Brian Johnson, Conchita Lee and Anthony Wisdom. Cast: Fred Williamson, Christopher Connelly, Cameron Mitchell, Joe Spinell, Val Avery, Jasmine Maimone, Micheal Dante, Sandy Cummings, Peter Brown, Stack Pierce, Suzanne von Schaack, Umberto Raho, Riccardo Parisio, Maurizio Bonuglia, James Spinks, Cyrus Elias, Stelio Candelli, Frank Pesce, Chris Conte, Vince Townsend. (R, 97 mins) During his eight-season career in pro football with the Pittsburgh Steelers, the Oakland Raiders, and the Kansas City Chiefs, DB Fred Williamson earned the nickname "The Hammer," and upon his retirement in 1968, he parlayed his tough gridiron persona into a TV and movie career. He landed a recurring role as Diahann Carroll's love interest on the NBC series JULIA and made his big-screen debut as Spearchucker Jones in Robert Altman's 1970 classic MASH. Williamson followed that with a supporting role in Otto Preminger's 1970 Liza Minnelli vehicle TELL ME THAT YOU LOVE ME, JUNIE MOON before finding his niche as one of the top blaxploitation stars of the 1970s. Williamson enjoyed one drive-in and grindhouse success after another, with HAMMER and THE LEGEND OF NIGGER CHARLEY in 1972, and no less than four films in 1973, with the sequel THE SOUL OF NIGGER CHARLEY, BLACK CAESAR and its sequel HELL UP IN HARLEM, and the 007-inspired THAT MAN BOLT. Williamson worked relentlessly throughout the decade, often teaming with fellow football legend Jim Brown in films like 1974's THREE THE HARD WAY and 1975's TAKE A HARD RIDE, but by the mid '70s, Williamson grew restless and wanted to start making his own independent movies through his own Po' Boy Productions. He made his directing debut with 1976's MEAN JOHNNY BARROWS and managed to talk some celebrity friends into co-starring, including MASH buddy Elliott Gould in a cameo as a bum, and Roddy McDowall ludicrously cast as a Mafioso. Williamson directed and starred in three more films in 1976: the western ADIOS AMIGO with Richard Pryor, followed by NO WAY BACK and its immediate sequel DEATH JOURNEY, the first two of four films where he'd play private eye Jesse Crowder. With Enzo G. Castellari's 1978 cult classic THE INGLORIOUS BASTARDS, Williamson began a second career in Italy, even directing the Italian-made MR. MEAN during his BASTARDS downtime. Though he made some American films in the '80s, most notably 1983's THE BIG SCORE and the same year's VIGILANTE, Williamson spent most of that decade in Italy, starring in Castellari's 1990: THE BRONX WARRIORS (1983) as well as the director's post-nuke WARRIORS OF THE WASTELAND (1983) and Lucio Fulci's post-nuke THE NEW GLADIATORS (1984). 1985 also saw him as a pitchman in a series of King Cobra malt liquor commercials, and the same year, he took a break from Italian genre fare to co-star in the short-lived Joe Pesci NBC series HALF NELSON.
But by the mid '80s, Williamson was getting lazy. He made a pair of almost interchangeable back-to-back thrillers with 1986's FOXTRAP and 1987's THE MESSENGER, both vanity projects (well, every Williamson movie is a vanity project to some extent) that co-starred Williamson BFF Christopher Connelly and were little more than an excuse to get Italian production company Realta Cinematografica to send him on paid vacations throughout Europe and the US. THE MESSENGER is especially bad, with Williamson demonstrating a level of carelessness that borders on audience contempt, whether it's staging inept action sequences, putting himself in an overlong love scene where he has the camera pan down so we see his co-star Sandy Cummings' hands caressing his gyrating ass, or padding the running time with absurdly long establishing shots like following two actors on a golf course for over a minute or planting the camera inside a cab and giving us an impromptu, MANOS: THE HANDS OF FATE-style travelogue every time his character arrives in a different city. We get a two-minute look at Vegas, up and down the strip, past the casinos and hotels, and even going blocks away, taking the audience on a captivating drive past the local Woolworth. There's also a scene where Michael Dante, as a Hollywood mobster, is shown pulling into his driveway, turning his car around in the driveway, then backing into the garage, pulling back out and then maneuvering the car back into the garage again so he can straighten it out. Then Williamson keeps the camera right where it's at while Dante gets out of the car and leisurely walks into what I presume is the actor's own home. It's at least a solid minute and a half of static screen time devoted to watching Dante dick around in his driveway.
The threadbare vigilante/revenge plot requires location work in Rome, Chicago, Hollywood, and Las Vegas simply because Williamson was given enough money to do so. The Hammer is Jake Sebastian Turner, a Green Berets legend released from a Rome prison and reunited with his wife Sabrina (Cummings, in her first and thus far only film), who's turned into a junkie while he was locked up. She's killed in a drive-by shooting and Jake is informed by the improbably-named Italian mob boss Gielgud (Riccardo Parisio) that Sabrina got involved with Rome drug traffickers who were supplying Chicago gangster Paolo (Maurizio Bonuglia). The same people who killed Sabrina also murdered Gielgud's stepson, and he offers Jake $500,000 to go to Chicago and track down and kill those responsible. Arriving in Chicago, Jake kills Paolo with a ninja star only to find out that he was just a part of the machine and he'll need to head out west to find the real bosses behind the operation. His path of vengeance takes him to Hollywood (Schwarzenegger's RAW DEAL on a theater marquee!), where he finds Emerson (Dante), whose tool company is used as a money-laundering and narcotics distribution front for Vegas mob kingpin Rico (Joe Spinell) and his top flunkies Clark (John Cassavetes inner circler Val Avery) and Harris (Peter Brown). Meanwhile, loose-cannon, plays-by-his-own-rules FBI agent Parker (Connelly) develops a begrudging admiration for the so-called "Messenger of Death" who's wiping out syndicate goons, and butts heads with Chicago police captain Carter (Cameron Mitchell, hamming it up but still outacted by his garish eyeglasses that must be seen to be believed) and irate detective Leroy (Stack Pierce), who want this mystery vigilante off the streets.
THE MESSENGER is grossly incompetent but calling it "so bad it's good" is a stretch. Williamson's direction is unbelievably sloppy, from the half-assed action scenes to his direction of the actors, none of whom appear to be aware of what kind of movie they're in. As a director, his chief concern seems to be getting women to throw themselves at him and staging as many King Cobra product placements as possible (they even get a shout-out in the closing credits). Williamson and Connelly play it straight, Connelly especially enjoying himself as Parker, pointlessly doing a T.J. HOOKER shoulder-roll into Rico's mansion and throwing around the usual made-up insults that he used in a lot of his Italian films (RAIDERS OF ATLANTIS, OPERATION NAM, STRIKE COMMANDO). His favorite standby "suckfish" makes a required appearance (calling someone "suckfish" is Connelly's "John Cusack vaping"), along with "shitstick" and calling Spinell "butt-wipe." Mitchell just seems to be goofing off (did he borrow his mother-in-law's glasses for this role?), Dante does what he's required to do--be the guy you get when John Saxon, Henry Silva and Tony Lo Bianco turn you down--and Spinell plays it broad, turning Rico into a whiny, sniveling Joe Besser of a mob boss. The Rome scenes with Italian actors are shot with live sound, and it's pretty clear when you listen to Eurocult stalwarts like Stelio Candelli (DEMONS) and Umberto Raho (THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE) that their grasp of English is tenuous at best (bonus points if you can understand a single word Raho says as the warden who releases Jake from prison). Even the dialogue in the American scenes is often difficult to decipher, as the actors are constantly cut off or drowned out by William Stuckey's repetitious, flatulent synth score.
And whether it's a fault of the script--somehow the work of three people, two of whom did nothing else after while the other (Anthony Wisdom) went on to write 1990's THE RETURN OF SUPERFLY--or Williamson's slapdash direction, THE MESSENGER offers one of the all-time great continuity gaffes, one that involves Mitchell's pissed-off Capt. Carter. When introduced, he's bitching at Parker and refusing to cooperate with him after the Chicago hit on Paolo. When others turn up dead in Hollywood, Parker informs Carter that the Messenger must've left Chicago and made his way out west, with Parker announcing "I'm going to L.A." as Carter chomps on his cigar and seethes, adjusting his ill-fitting Estelle Getty glasses. Much later, in Hollywood, after Emerson is killed and his naive wife (Suzanne von Schaack) finds out he's a drug dealer and that's how he was providing for her and their children, she inexplicably turns up as a cokehead hooker in Vegas for no reason at all. She recognizes Jake at a casino, dials the operator and asks for the Los Angeles police department, specifically "Chief Carter," as we see Cameron Mitchell pick up the phone. Wait..,LAPD Chief Carter? Wasn't he just a precinct captain in Chicago a few scenes back, with a map of Illinois on the wall of his office? Sure enough, Carter rounds up the cops and Parker and they go straight to...Rico's mansion in Las Vegas?! Is Williamson even paying attention to his own movie?
Williamson campaigning for
Donald Trump in 2016.
Williamson continued dividing his time between Italy and America, and by the 1990s was a C-lister relegated to straight-to-video status with films like 1991's THREE DAYS TO A KILL and 1992's SOUTH BEACH. He enjoyed a brief resurgence in 1996 with the all-star blaxploitation throwback ORIGINAL GANGSTAS and with longtime fans Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez giving him a showy supporting role in FROM DUSK TILL DAWN, two years after turning down an offer from Tarantino to play crime boss Marcellus Wallace in PULP FICTION. Williamson passed on the part because of the scene where Wallace is raped by Zed in the Gimp dungeon in the pawn shop basement.. He got to demonstrate some slow-burn comedy skills, playing off Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson as the perpetually flustered Capt. Doby in 2004's STARSKY & HUTCH, but other than that, Williamson has done some sporadic TV guest spots and some Z-grade DTV swill you find in the New Release section at Walmart. He's also become a regular presence in low-budget faithsploitation dramas like 2015's LAST OUNCE OF FREEDOM, where he played a villain trying to stop a small rural town from celebrating Christmas. Now 79 and probably still able to kick your ass, Williamson most recently made the news in 2016 when he was spotted on the presidential campaign trail competing with Ben Carson for the coveted "Donald Trump's black friend" role.
