Writer/producer Glen Morgan issues us his Big Screen debut with Willard, a remake of the surprise 1971 hit by the same name directed by Daniel Mann based upon the novel Ratman’s Notebooks by Gilbert Ralston, writing under the nom de plume Stephen Gilbert. Gilbert Ralston’s parable is a succinct, exquisite tale encompassing Kafka-esque overtones pertaining to class conflict, replete with animals as central figures. However, unlike Ralston’s gift for storytelling, Morgan’s accomplished abilities with a pen are overextended when expand to feature-length form. As such, Willard is one of the more rushed, if not most rushed, adaptations of a novel in cinematic history.
Willard Stiles (Crispin Glover) is an outcast whose only companion is his widowed, frail mother, Henrietta (Jackie Burroughs). What benevolent abuses are not heaped upon him at home are malevolently distributed by his employer, Frank Martin (R. Lee Ermey). As a consequence, instead of ridding his basement of a rat infestation upon his mother’s request, Willard befriends the rodents as he trains them to do his bidding. However, as Willard seeks vengeance upon those who have mistreated him in the past, a rivalry appears between himself and the alpha rat, Ben.
Willard begins promisingly as we are greeted with a Burton-esque atmosphere, complimented by Shirley Walker’s wink-and-a-nod score, thereby signaling a forthcoming Gothic fantasy. However, “underdeveloped” lives where metaphor once resided in Ralston’s tale as poignant black comedy is cleverly inserted in the first fifteen minutes of the film before being all but abandoned as characters are flippantly introduced, poorly developed, and whose associations are subsequently disappointingly vague and thereby irritatingly ineffective.
Whereas Ralston slowly, patiently, and plausibly establishes his central character’s relationship to his rats as well as his love interest–in Morgan’s case the wasted figure of Cathryn (Laura Harring)–the latter appears to be a burden to the director for “Cat” does nothing which the filmmaker couldn’t have achieved without her. As we attempt to vainly discern the exact relationship between Willard, his favored rat–Socrates–and the latter’s counter, Ben, we are left scratching our heads in confusion by the film’s finale when the rats are forsaken without seeming rhyme or reason.
In lieu of the fact that black Ben is analogous to George Orwell’s figure of Napoleon as the white Socrates likewise equates with Snowball from Animal Farm, Morgan all but discards the middle of Ralston’s text, thereby eradicating much of the story’s exposition atop the fear-inducting figure of Ratman himself, whereby we witness the harrowing image of our narrator donning a Halloween mask as he appears as a man-sized rodent who plagues the city. In its place we are given a glamorized Hollywood ending which seems to condemn a character which, because the viewer has spent so little substantive time with him, we can neither condemn nor advocate. The argument that the death of the white, vestal Socrates, i.e. Freudian Superego, is catalytic justification for Willard’s rage becomes a desperate act of grasping for proverbial straws considering what surrounds the otherwise vacant circumstances.
Eschewing that Morgan takes a solid piece of art and arrogantly tries to craft it to his own ends, thereby violating the dictum that a masterpiece is just that–something which cannot be changed without sacrificing its effectiveness, and despite the fact that R. Lee Ermey as a dictatorial boss is ingenious when placed alongside sporadic rodentia lingo as Willard is caught “like a rat in a cage” by his employer, the conceit of Ralston’s novel is flippantly instilled with the arbitrary inclusion of a mock-up of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho via a wrinkled, tyrannical old mother, a basement wherein a secret lies, a social outcast with homicidal intent who is ill at ease around women, and a rather odd sleeping arrangement. However, even in this light, Willard is unsuccessful for its parodies come off as half-cocked at best. Even mockery must be feasible and entertaining in order to be successful, an aesthetic rule which Morgan ultimately forgets as he tries to jungle more than his accustomed three balls as his comfort zone of 30-televised minutes morphs into a chaotic, mismanaged 100 as, by ratio, Morgan’s added seven balls fall to the floor. In short, the director seems to be more preoccupied in trying to be clever than in being a filmmaker, to say nothing of being a clever filmmaker.
The celluloid upon which Glen Morgan’s Willard resides is completely and utterly, to the point of inexcusability, wasted. Whereas Gilbert Ralston’s Ratman’s Notebooks actually focuses upon the genesis, rise, and decline of the titular character, it seems as if the director is not concerned that the success of the text might have something to do with such, but rather opts to fill the screen with adlibbed, gratuitous, inconsequential scenes of carnage, which only serves to further accentuate the fact that we care nothing (any more or less than the director seems to) for any of the characters or their plights, which is something of an accomplishment considering that animals, when placed on screen, almost always evoke the audience’s sympathy. Not so with Morgan, who is apparently attempting to subtlety suggest that Ed Wood’s reincarnation papers have finally managed to make it through processing.
-Egregious Gurnow
- Interview with J.R. Bookwalter - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Andrew J. Rausch - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Rick Popko and Dan West - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Director Stevan Mena (Malevolence) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Screenwriter Jeffery Reddick (Day of the Dead 2007) - January 22, 2015
- Teleconference interview with Mick Garris (Masters of Horror) - January 22, 2015
- A Day at the Morgue with Corri English (Unrest) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Writer/Director Nacho Cerda (The Abandoned, Aftermath) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actress Thora Birch (Dark Corners, The Hole, American Beauty) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actor Jason Behr, Plus Skinwalkers Press Coverage - January 22, 2015
