# Willard! **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [November 29, 2003, 7:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/willard/215882 "2003-11-29T07:36:44Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 11\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Xander\_Cane](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/x/ce73a5/32.png) [@Xander\_Cane](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Xander_Cane)\ **Post date:** [November 29, 2003, 7:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/willard/215882/1 "2003-11-29T07:36:44Z")
Recently I saw (the recent) Willard a couple times with my friends and that is a great movie! Yes, it isn’t a classic or that great compared to amazing movies but on its own it is awsome! Crispen Glover is sooo creepy and delicious… or in better words… well word, “creepilicious”! Also, if you have or rent the DVD, watch the music video! It is so odd and hilarious. The documentry on the rat clubs (or whatever the hell they are) is great and unintentionally hilarious! There is a woman who owns like 200 rats actually says “If I had known in highschool that I could train my rats to kill people… I probably would have!”😃 ---
**Author:** ![Menocchio](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/9de053/32.png) [@Menocchio](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Menocchio)\ **Post date:** [November 29, 2003, 3:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/willard/215882/2 "2003-11-29T15:23:37Z")
Yeah. I have this one too. An overlooked gem. Not the best movie ever made, but a hell of a lot of fun. ---
**Author:** ![eli\_the\_fanatic](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/ccd318/32.png) [@eli\_the\_fanatic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/eli_the_fanatic)\ **Post date:** [November 29, 2003, 3:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/willard/215882/3 "2003-11-29T15:48:19Z")
I thought it was good. The scene with the cat was brilliant, where they played the Michael Jackson song “Ben.” That was the theme song to the original movie, or maybe its sequel (which was named “Ben”). I’ve never seen a more tightly done scene with only animal actors. ---
**Author:** ![JThunder](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/e95f7d/32.png) [@JThunder](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JThunder)\ **Post date:** [November 29, 2003, 5:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/willard/215882/4 "2003-11-29T17:41:49Z")
It was the theme to the sequel. Rat Ben was sort of a second banana in the original. ---
**Author:** ![FilmGeek](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/b19c9b/32.png) [@FilmGeek](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FilmGeek)\ **Post date:** [November 29, 2003, 7:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/willard/215882/5 "2003-11-29T19:01:41Z")
I love the version of “Ben” sung by Crispin himself (over the end credits). I also thought the scene with the cat was brilliantly directed. I’ve never seen better animal ‘acting’. ---
**Author:** ![ratty](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/ccd318/32.png) [@ratty](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ratty)\ **Post date:** [November 29, 2003, 7:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/willard/215882/6 "2003-11-29T19:22:23Z")
How strange. I just saw this movie the other day and was tempted to start a thread about it. I liked it. It wasn’t great, but it was good. I’m a big fan of Crispin Glover just because he’s so outrageously bizarre, and a pretty good actor to boot. He’s got the freakiest eyes. I’m also a big fan of rats. Over the years I’ve had 30+ as pets, so the documentary was also fun. I’ve never been to a rat show, and I’ve never met anyone who likes rats as much as I do. Because of this, I can’t really call this a horror movie. I know many people are frightened of rats, and with good reason, since wild rats can carry diseases and will wreck your house if they get in, but for me, seeing a house overrun with rats is just neat. It’s also sort of funny for me to see how moviemakers try to make rats look threatening by wetting their fur to make it look dirty and only showing them in half-light. They really are too cute to look scary otherwise. (The rat who played Ben was a Gambian rat, which is actually a marsupial. Norway rats just don’t get that big.) The only part I really didn’t like was when Socrates got killed. I cried. But it was sort of a necessary motivation for Willard to go completely nuts and send out his killer rodent army, so in the context of the story I guess I can forgive it. I’ve never seen the original, or the sequel _Ben_. Does anybody want to spoil them for me? ---
**Author:** ![eli\_the\_fanatic](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/ccd318/32.png) [@eli\_the\_fanatic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/eli_the_fanatic)\ **Post date:** [November 29, 2003, 9:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/willard/215882/7 "2003-11-29T21:54:01Z")
To steal a joke from Roger Ebert: The first movie Willard was a big hit, primarily because audiences got to see Ernest Borgnine eaten alive by an unholy army of rats, which they’d been wanting to see for years… The first movie is only OK. Crispin Glover’s performance makes the remake more worthy of being called a cult classic. Really, is there an actor who could be more convincing in that role? The only good thing about Ben was the theme song. It tries to get cute with a kid befriending Ben. ---
**Author:** ![Krisfer\_the\_Cat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/5f9b8f/32.png) [@Krisfer\_the\_Cat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Krisfer_the_Cat)\ **Post date:** [November 29, 2003, 10:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/willard/215882/8 "2003-11-29T22:38:53Z")
I remember the first one… back in my crush on Bruce Davison days. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [November 30, 2003, 12:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/willard/215882/9 "2003-11-30T00:29:59Z")
I wanted to see Willard’s boss get eaten by rats after he had been on-screen for one minute. But it was worth the wait. ---
**Author:** ![look\_ninjas](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/b2d939/32.png) [@look\_ninjas](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/look_ninjas)\ **Post date:** [November 30, 2003, 1:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/willard/215882/10 "2003-11-30T01:17:56Z")
I loved Crispin Glover in that, just because he was so unselfconscious. Some actors seem to always look good even when they’re supposed to be total nervous wrecks. Even when they’re freaking out, they never lose their cool. But Crispin Glover was shrieking and getting hysterical, and when he cried, he’d have snot hanging down in everything… It didn’t look like an actor acting upset. It looked like a guy freaking out. That always impresses me. ---
**Author:** ![Omikawaii](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/779978/32.png) [@Omikawaii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Omikawaii)\ **Post date:** [December 3, 2003, 11:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/willard/215882/11 "2003-12-03T23:08:07Z")
I wuvies Crispin…