Willard

Plot synopsis:
Willard Stiles is a meek social misfit who later develops a strange affinity for rats. He lives in a large Victorian home, with only his cranky and decrepit mother Henrietta for company. On his 27th birthday, he is humiliated to come home to a birthday party thrown by his mother, where all of the attendees are her own aging friends. After having left the party in embarrassment, he notices a rat in his backyard and tosses it pieces of his birthday cake. Later, his mother gets upset with him for leaving the party and she scolds him while also discussing how badly the house is falling apart. The next morning he goes out and feeds another rat (this one has babies with it) while imitating their squeaks. His mother starts telling him that he needs to kill the rats that have been running around their yard, which Willard refuses to do.
When Willard goes to work he is promptly scolded by his boss Al Martin for tardiness and no attempt to get assignments done on time. Later he returns home and sets about killing the rats as his mother ordered. He puts food on a center rock in a large well, placing a wooden plank to act as a bridge for the rats. When the rats have gathered on the rock, he removes the plank, trapping the rats. He then turns on the water, intending to let the well fill up and drown the animals. However, his guilt will not allow Willard to carry through the plan, and he turns off the water and returns the plank to its place, allowing the rats to escape. When his mother asks if he killed the rats, he lies and tells her he did.
That afternoon he begins playing with a rat he names Queenie, and begins teaching the rats words like "food" and "empty". He sees a white rat and immediately takes a liking to it. The white rat becomes his best companion and he names it Socrates for his wisdom. Numerous other rats quickly emerge, one of which is a bigger black specimen whom he names Ben.
At work, Mr. Martin continues to antagonize Willard, telling him he will not give him a raise and then urging him to sell his mother's house. Willard sneaks up to a party Mr. Martin is throwing, opens his suitcase which has rats in it, and then urges them to go get the food and ruin the party. The guests begin screaming and Willard laughs behind the bushes where he is hiding.
The next day Willard's mother dies. He discovers that the house is heavily mortgaged. After this Willard is pressured by the banks to give up the house.
Willard decides to bring Socrates and Ben to the office with him. He sets them on some shelves and tells them to be good. One of his friends at work gives him a cat named Chloe. Chloe constantly claws at the suitcase where Ben and Socrates are hiding. Willard hands her off to a complete stranger and drives away.
The rat population is getting too big, and Willard cannot afford to feed them much longer. He decides to steal money from his boss, using his now-trained rats. He orders the rats to "tear it up" and puts them in front of the office door.
Later, at home, Willard gets mad at Ben and starts putting him outside the bedroom, but Ben persists in sleeping in his room.
The next day he again takes Ben and Socrates to work. One of the workers spots the rats and Mr. Martin bludgeons Socrates to death, leaving Willard devastated. After Mr. Martin confronts Willard over the theft, Willard instructs the rats, led by Ben, to kill Mr. Martin. Unnerved by Martin's gruesome death, Willard then abandons Ben, goes home and begins sealing up any holes through which the rats could gain entry. He also puts as many rats as he can into cages and drowns them in the small pool outside.
Willard has dinner with Joan, a co-worker he likes, but is startled to look up and see Ben back in the house staring at him from a corner shelf. He gets up and notices hordes of rats running up the stairs from the basement. He orders Joan to leave and locks the door before confronting Ben. Willard stalls and begins mixing rat poison, but Ben reads the box and squeals loudly, alerting the others, some of whom attack Willard. In an act of desperation, Willard tries to hit the rats with a broom, but misses. He runs upstairs but the other rats come after him. Shutting the door, he stands there terrified. The rats begin to gnaw at the door and eventually break in to devour him, and he says to Ben, "I was good to you!" The camera zooms in to a close-up of Ben and the credits roll.

Tags: revenge, cult, comedy, murder, prank

Review:
Willard Stiles (Crispin Glover) is a lonely and deranged man living in an old mansion with his sick mother Henrietta Stiles (Jackie Burroughs).
Willard is the tale of an extremely introvert middle-aged man (lives with his needy mother, no girlfriend, stuck in a hopeless job) who discover his ability to control and command little rodentsrats in particular.
Crispin Glover  the man with the most incomprehensible cult following in the film industry  is brilliantly cast as Willard.
People who hated this movie went to see it with the preconceived notion that rats would be doing a lot bloodier leg work for Willard.
What they got was a movie wherein Crispin Glover kisses his best rattie friend and slowly ambles toward insanity.Willard has flaws, and plenty of them, but they rarely detract from what is, at heart, a psychological parable and subtle love story.
Crispin Glover's performance is one of his most genuinely human and believable, evoking ugly emotions rarely seen in Hollywood, while still retaining a manic kind of dignity.You can hardly fault New Line for marketing Willard as a horror flick, since that is what would inevitably sell better.
But Willard is really more of a movie for people who genuinely like rats, not those who fear them.
It is much like the character of Willard, in that sense, and the coincidence is almost admirable.The movie is unquestionably more subtle, evocative, and well-crafted than its predecessor; it is also more faithful to the original novel, Ratman's Notebooks, than the version starring Bruce Davison.
No movies have been up to par in so many different levels.Crispin Glover puts in the best acting performance of the year, and possibly one of the best of all time is the title character.
How time has made that hymn to interspecies love sound creepy!) Writer-director Glen Morgan has crafted a chewy little parable about capitalism, and his sardonic depiction of the real rat race, with a reliably savage Lee Ermey flogging his office employees behind a motivational sign reading "Prudent Aggression," gives the film more than the usual B horror subtext.
The movie centers about Crispin Glover a quirky and lone man about thirty years old .
There are thousand rats and they have been made by animatronics and computer generator specials effects(FX).Acting by Crispin Glover is excellent , interpreting to Willard as a twisted mind is fantastic , likeness to Norman Bates/Anthony Perkins of Psychosis .
R. Lee Ermey as the evil and villain chief is perfect such as his acting in ¨Full metal jacket¨ , Laura Elena Harring (Mulholland drive) is cute .Direction by Glen Morgan is nicely made , cinematography by Robert MacLachlan is first-rate and Shirley Walker's musical score is gorgeous.It's a remake to another 1971 film featured by Bruce Davison who only appears in photography as Willard's father into this 2003 film.Rating 6/10 , average ..
A horror movie none-the-less, Willard is an interesting film that we don't see too often.
I'm sure Crispin Glover would be happy to know that "Willard" makes people think.
I liked it a lot and Crispin Glover is a good actor, although this is the only film I have ever seen him in.
As almost everyone who loved this movie has said, Crispin Glover WAS Willard.
Glen Morgan directs in a very interesting stylized fashion almost as eccentric as David Lynch or Tim Burton, and Crispin Glover gives a knockout performance in the title role.
(Not so far as to have Willard Styles wear a rat mask, though.)     The movie does have some awkward elements; the pacing is a bit off, probably because the structure is askew a bit, but overall, it's a fascinating, creepy movie, very well made with fine performances.
He went through a broad range emotions, portraying them mostly to rats, which in my opinion, is a great feat.Willard may be a bit slow, but the pacing of the film actually portrays the character.
WILLARD is one of the best remakes of a horror film I have ever seen.
The film manages to stay just on that right balance of horror and comedy and is able to switch in a way that does catch the viewer off guard, like the scene with the dog barking at Willard while he's walking home.
This film was an emotional experience for me and I applaud Crispin Glover and director Glen Morgan for pulling off such a wonderful film.PROS: -Scary atmosphere -Top notch performance by Crispin Glover -A chilling ending -Successfully a horrifying and disturbing film -cool homages to the original CONS: -The PG-13 rating is misleading.
Crispin Glover does a perfect job as Willard, it's his best performance yet, and R.
It's a fairly predictable movie- you know from his very first scene that Willard's boss is going to get it.
A movie about a guy and a bunch of rats isn't likely to become a world-wide hit, but I think this will be more popular on video.
Crispin Glover plays Willard Stiles, who still lives with his mother and doesn't have a girlfriend or any friends at all.
Crispin Glover is great this this role and i don't know if this is better then the original because i haven't seen it..
Crispin Glover's acting in this movie is very good.
I'm not a big fan of the whole horror remake craze (to say the least), but the original Willard had some good ideas that weren't capitalised on, thus making it ripe for a remake - and Glen Morgan has really capitalised on that fact with this film!
Feeling humiliated at work and at the hands of his mother, Willard turns to the rats in his cellar for friendship...One of my main criticisms of the 1971 original was that Bruce Davison wasn't creepy enough for the role.
Glover fits the role like a glove, and even manages to convince during Willard's outburst scenes, which in fairness are pretty pathetic.
The rats themselves are made much better use of in this film too, and the central pair of Socrates and Ben are almost given a human character.
The style is different from the original, in that it mixes Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho" and "Birds" (if "Birds" was actually called "Rats") but also if these movies were directed by Tim Burton.
Crispen Glover is Willard essentially, the fact that he did not get an Oscar nomination for this film is quite disappointing, but he is also very weird like in every movie he has been in.
this is a slightly different reinterpretation of the good 1970 film of the same name, rather than a straight forward remake and apart from the ending, this new version is a little better than the original.
some good creepy scenes and film doesn't overdo the gore.surprisingly crispin glover, one of my least favourite actors is perfect casting here and gives the best performance of his career so far in my opinion and even garners a lot of sympathy.r lee ermy is effective as the hateful boss and even bears a resemblance to ernest borgnine who played the part in the original film.there are nods to the original film with pictures of bruce davison who was the original willard here used as crispin glover's dead father and also use of the michael jackson song "ben" used in the sequel to willard entitled "ben" in 1972.this was a lot better than expected,overall as like most remakes you think "why bother"?
...and in my humble opinion,except for Ernst Borgnine,Glen Morgan outdistances the 1971 original version.It was not a hard task ,mind you,cause that version was rather listless ;it's not the same problem as that of "the haunting" (1963) and its "remake" .I take Crispin Glover any day over Bruce Davison -here represented by an apparition as Willard's father on the photographs-.Davison was too boy-next-door,too good -looking.Glover gives a raw,dirty, over the top performance.The special effects are far superior to the original's and for once it was necessary.The love affair is kept to the very minimum -no intimate dinner for Willard and Cathryn- focusing on the poor lad's humiliations (it is a kind of male "Carrie" )Glen Morgan has a good sense of humor ,often black humor: the nursery rhyme "Three blind mice " (See how they run/They come to take you away)comes back several time ,always at the right moment.I dig this line when the boss is killing Willard's pet : "Hi Disney,this is Mickey Mouse speaking!
We 'll meet again!" Another hilarious sequence: the boss is watching naked women on his computer and realizes that his mouse ...has turned into a rat!The endings of the two versions are different ,but I have my doubts: might they think of "Willard 2"?.
Although it left me with severely negative feelings, the production design was quite good (I enjoyed how everything about Willard himself was anachronistic), the acting was likewise fine, the cinematography was also great, and it DID manage to produce a strong reaction in me, albeit not a positive one.
The scene of Willard taking the 7 train was great!This funny, dark, and sometimes sad story is enhanced by a terrific Crispin Glover, great setting and tone mixing for a unique environment, and good supporting characters.
In this remake of the 1971 Daniel Mann film, Crispin Glover stars as Willard Stiles, a lonely, slightly unhinged, loser who trains an army of rats to do his bidding.
Aside from Glover's excellent acting, other high points include Ermey's in-your-face performance as Willard's abusive boss, stylish direction by Glen Morgan and terrific special effects (the computer-generated rats are surprisingly lifelike), all of which combine to make this one of the best horror films in years.
This version contains just enough homage to the original to satisfy its fans (the portrait of Bruce Davison and the humorous use of the song "Ben" in particular), while bringing enough new dimension on board to create an admirable film in its own right.Special credit goes, of course, to Crispin Glover's performance.
Whether it be the Hitchcock camera shots, Crispen's amazing acting or the sequence using the Jackson 5's song 'Ben', you get to witness a great gothic film played like a Greek tragedy.
Crispin Glover's over the top performance is fantastic, and show stopping .The movie is a lot darker than the original, but it's a lot more imaginative.
Crispin Glover is probably best remembered for his role as "the creepy thin man" in the Charlie's Angels films, his myterious character doesn't say a word in either one.
Crispin Glover played Willard perfectly, managing to be miserable, scared, furious, helpless, vengeful and lonely all at the same time..
Crispin Glover is the perfect person to play Willard.
When Willard first befriends the rats, it would be a ridiculous scene in a horror movie, but it works well in this dark comedy.
It's like seeing a Tarkovsky or Bresson film in Blockbuster's 'recommended' section.I've been a Crispin Glover fan for years and to no surprise he gave another brilliant performance this time.
Crispin Glover, rats and overall decent movie.
Crispin Glover's over the top performance is perfect for a film which is pretty much a parody of the original and its sequel entitled Ben.
While not always a fan of his work, this movie, in many ways, seems to have taken much inspiration from the work of Tim Burton, complete with dark, neo-gothic sets (The Stiles home is a scarier Bates residence, while Willard's workplace sometimes come off like a Dickens as interpreted by Poe), and a score that almost seems cribbed from Danny Elfman's work on Burton's films.The film also has a better resolution.
Whereas Sondra Locke's female lead in the 1971 original seemed to have some legitimate potential interest in Davison's Willard, Laura Harring's Cat just seems to sympathize with him.Combine all of the above with the most darkly clever use of Michael Jackson's "Ben" that could be imagined (I'm sure, if he's seen the film, he probably doesn't appreciate it)..
Lee Ermey as his boss fit well within his character and acting ability.The rats looked remarkably real, and there were a lot of scenes that give you the creeps.There was a lot of allegory in the film, most notably the duality of man with the two main rats, Socrates and Ben.
Crispin Glover is wonderful as Willard and R Lee Emery as Mr. Martin steals the movie.
I felt genuinely sorry for Willard, and I thought Crispin Glover played his part perfectly.
I went to see Willard with my friend Bratic.As soon as the film started at the credits I knew I was going to like the movie.
I didn't know if that was the movie it reminded me of but it seemed like it was Tim Burton no matter what, even though he had nothing to do with this film what so ever.
I mean the acting in this film was superb.What I liked about the movie: I already mentioned above that I thought that acting was great.
I know everybody is going to be calling this Glover's film (which it very much is), but whoever trained the rats for this movie did an amazing job.
Willard was a very interesting film and if it was not for Crispin Glover's performance this movie would have sucked.
Your the only friend I've ever had."-WillardIts too bad the academy never looks at these kind of films for performances, because Glover was insane with this role, (I mean that in a good way,) although some people might consider him to be overacting at some points in the film.Bottom line, Willard was a good movie, and this is coming from a guy who hates these kind of movies.
The rats are creepy, Willard is slimey, the mother is scarey and Mr. Martin is a tyrant.It's a "dumb fun" movie..
There is just a lot of powerful and dramatic scenes in the movie, an outstanding performance by Crispen Glover, his best ever.
Soon, more rats move in, including the wanna-be top-dog Ben, and they follow everything that Willard says.Willard is rather creepy, but the thing that pushes this movie is not the scares, nor all of the rats, but the performance by Crispin Glover.
The first movie I ever saw was the original Willard in 1971, so 32 years later, I couldn't pass up seeing the remake.
I got the impression that there were elements of this film that the original wanted to pull off but couldn't due to the technology of the time.Crispin Glover was brilliantly cast as Willard, and he turns in a memorable performance.
In terms of acting, Glover carries the film, managing to play off the idea of treating people like rats and rats like people quite well.Willard's house, the main setting for the movie, is very well done.
This movie had Crispin Glover in 95% of the scenes and he steals the attention the entire time.
Not the rats, not the suspense - although both come in plentiful supply - but Glover's performance as Willard.
I mean, you're going to see a Crispin Glover movie.
A movie with such a dark atmosphere and appetite for disturbance is perfect for Burton, but first time director Glen Morgan succeeds brilliantly in this beautifully twisted character study.Although Willard is advertised as a horror film, it does not sink to the level of conventional, mainstream horror.
you go to a movie like this to be entertained; and it does entertain, unless you're one of those elitist-snob types that thinks all good horror stopped with [insert obscure european director of choice here].crispin glover's acting was amazing.
Crispin Glover was SO excellent in his performance and should receive an Oscar nomination (although he probably won't as snooty Oscar will shun this movie), he was the perfect casting choice for Willard.
I never saw the original Willard, which probably put me in a disadvantage while watching this sequel-cum-remake starring Crispin Glover in the lead role.
From watching it with a fresh mind, I could see that the film had moments of inspiration, a horror movie that has few real scares but builds a lot of its feel by pure atmosphere, which indeed becomes over-bearing by the third act once the rats take over the Willard estate.
Anyone who decides to see this rather B-film will know that it's best assest is its creepiness, however they may recognize that it doesn't have the shock value that the original probably contained.Glover astonishingly is really effective in the lead, as a lonely freak who looks after his deteriorating mother in a house that slowly reveals itself to be infested with rodent after rodent after rodent, which Willard clings to and controls like a gothic pied-piper.
What remains the same between the films is that Willard is a social misfit who befriends and has a strange connection/control over a massive colony of rodents, led by the rats Socrates and Ben. A major element that separates this film from the original is the casting of perennial oddball Crispin Glover in the title role, who gives a highly entertaining off-kilter performance that is pitch perfect for director/co-writer Morgan's jet black humor.
While Glover looks like an ideal choice to play Willard, that doesn't necessarily mean that he is.
WILLARD finds the remarkable Crispin Glover playing a strange loner who spends a lot of time hanging out in his elderly mother's basement, while being browbeaten by his belligerent boss at work.For those who don't know, this film's all about rats.
All in all Willard was a good film.
He did a wonderful job acting like a modern day Norman Bates and by the end of the movie, you really felt sorry for Willard.
While it may have done poorly in the box office, this stylish remake of the 1971 cult thriller was one of the first films in the horror-remake cycle.Lonely, fragile young man befriends the rats that live in his basement and discovers that they make a good tool for vengeance!As with the original Willard, it's the performance of the actor playing the title character that drives this film to be strangely compelling.