"Start the day, oh come along now, Ben. Come on out before I count to ten. If you stay, you will miss all the fun and there's room for everyone..."
If you’re like me and have vague, fleeting memories of renting Willard and Ben many years ago, chances are they’ve been conflated quite a bit, with each film overlapping the other. That was my experience, anyway: while Willard was only faintly familiar, its sequel was much more so, which only makes sense considering I would have likely watched it more as a kid. Not only does it boast a child protagonist, but it’s also more in line with what you’d expect a killer rat movie to be like. Where Willard is a slow-burning character drama that just happens to feature killer rats, Ben goes all-in on the lunacy inherent in the premise. This is the one you want to watch for (mostly) pure schlock, as the title suggests everything you need to know: this time, it’s Ben, the highly intelligent, scheming rat taking center stage to wreck some shit for 90 minutes.
Picking up moments after Willard ended, Ben finds a gaggle of rubbernecking onlookers gawking on the scene at the Stiles house. Authorities of discovered the corpse of poor Willard, now gnawed at and presumably mostly eaten away. The culprit is obvious, yet the police are befuddled: not a single trace of an actual living rat can be detected. When one of them starts poking around, however, he discovers they’re inexplicably hiding in the walls and cabinet. None too pleased about being found, they immediately devour the poor bastard before quickly scurrying off again, once again leaving the police confounded. This time, they abandon the old mansion completely and start wreaking havoc all over town. Along the way, Ben is befriended by another loner in Danny (Lee Montgomery), a sickly little boy with a heart condition.
Of course, it’s that last little development that keeps Ben firmly on the eccentric side. Eschewing the temptation to simply have the film focus on Ben’s now rampant destruction, there’s an attempt at recapturing the weird, character-driven dynamic from Willard. It’s not quite as striking this time around, but it is a decidedly odd turn of events, mostly because Danny is such a strange presence and personality. Despite his sickness, he’s preternaturally gifted at, like, everything: playing piano, composing songs, putting on marionette shows. Montgomery matches it with a precocious turn that falls somewhere on the spectrum between grating and endearing, with gradual hints of deviousness being added into the mix when he begins to cover for Ben.
That’s essentially what Ben boils down to: the story of a boy who refuses to, er, rat out his pet rodent to the cops. Like Willard before it, the film plays out askew but without winking at the audience—it’s absurd, to be sure, but it’s almost too fucked up to even chuckle at. Even a scene where Ben and his minions exact revenge against a bully on Danny’s behalf isn’t played too triumphantly, as Danny’s refusal to cooperate with the police takes an obvious toll on his poor mother (Rosemary Murphy) and sister (Meredith Baxter). They know something is obviously up with the suddenly cagey Danny, who is also very concerned about his creeping mortality. It turns out it’s kind of hard to indulge in the trashy potential of a movie when it also features scenes of a 10-year-old asking his sister if he’s going to die. Not helping matters: she responds by insisting that everyone dies and that, yes, Danny’s doctor has recently stated that his condition might soon be fatal. What a buzzkill.
And yet, this is somehow the same film that features a copious amount of unhinged destruction from a pack of rats. At least half of Ben is dedicated to the title character engaging in random acts of violence. Nothing is safe: a truck driver’s rig, the town supermarket, and a spa resort all fall victim to Ben’s horde during the film’s more exploitative scenes. There’s more of those here than there were in Willard, a film that was admittedly a bit more fully formed and more tightly constructed than this sequel. Willard deftly tows the line between disparate tones; Ben is a bit more haphazard in slapping them all together. Scenes with Ben and Danny feel like a screwy kids movie, with the rest taking on the tenor of the schlocky killer animal flicks that would come to dominate the 70s trash cinema landscape. The two meet in the middle with a nicely crafted climax that takes Danny and his sister down into the bowels of the sewers to help Ben brace for the coming assault once the police finally snuff out his location.
Just poring over the absurdity of that previous sentence comes close to aptly summarizing how strange (and fun!) Ben manages to be. In addition to everything else going on, it’s also a goddamn police procedural about hunting down killer rats, with Joseph Campanella as a high-strung cop and Arthur O’Connell playing the thorn-in-the-side reporter. With musical interludes and marionette shows peppered in, there’s rarely a dull moment in Ben, a film that somehow transcended all this wackiness to earn an honest-to-god Academy Award nomination for Best Song thanks to Michael Jackson’s rendition of the theme. Of all the things that make the least sense between these two movies, this might be the most inexplicable, and, even though Ben lost out to “The Morning After” from The Poseidon Adventure, it allowed this weird little film to forever carve itself into the public consciousness.
Which, again, makes it all the more strange that it and Willard practically disappeared during the past twenty years. For most of that time, I assumed clearing the use of Jackson’s performance might have been the biggest stumbling block, but it was actually even simpler than that: all this time, it’s just been a lack of elements, per Bruce Davison’s interview on the Willard disc. Scream Factory’s disclaimer on the Ben release seems to confirm this, as it opens with a note about the transfer being sourced from a surviving archival print rather than the original negative or an interpositive. Nonetheless, the presentation is fine (it’s just not reference quality, but you probably wouldn’t expect that regardless), and Scream has also provided a commentary by Montgomery alongside the typical assortment of trailers, TV ads, and radio spots.
It’s been said a lot about Scream Factory’s releases, but it bears repeating: this is a case where we’re lucky to finally see these particular films on a digital format. Everything else is gravy. Or cheese. Whatever. Now, if we could just convince WB to release the remake on Blu…
