There is no shortage of films about young people who get angry and take revenge via some unethical means - Carrie, Evilspeak, Kiss of the Tarantula...the list goes on. But what makes Willard stand out from the rest of the crowd? Well, the answer to that has to be 'nothing really', though the film did come out before a lot of the similar films so I guess it deserves some credit for that fact. Willard is a fairly creepy little affair which features a handful of the 'classic' horror elements, those being rats, a creepy kid, a lonely old house etc and while the story comes together fairly well, Willard's main problem is that it's just not interesting enough. The plot focuses on Willard; a troubled young man who lives alone with his mother after the death of his father some years earlier. He's put under pressure by his mother his boss, who wants to force him out of the company because he wants Willard's house. Willard's only friends (aside from the girl at work) are his two pet rats, Ben and Socrates, but after a tragedy at work; Willard decides that enough is enough...
The title character is played by Bruce Davison, who if you ask me isn't really creepy enough. The whole rats thing adds to his creepiness, but on the face of it he looks like your average kid, and personally I think the film would have worked better with someone a bit more foreboding in the lead role. Davison gets excellent support from Ernest Borgnine as his unsympathetic boss, and Borgnine manages to steal the show every time he appears on screen. The plot does move rather slowly, however, and the film cant really described as a thriller. The whole thing about Willard and his rats doesn't come through well either; we see him holding them, stroking them and talking to them but there's never really too much of a bond formed and the film constantly feels like it can't portray what it is that it wants to portray. There is something enjoyable about Willard though, the way it plods along means that it's easy to get into and it never became boring enough to make me want to reach for the remote. I have to say that the ending was a bit of disappointment, but you could do worse than this film I suppose.
The title character is played by Bruce Davison, who if you ask me isn't really creepy enough. The whole rats thing adds to his creepiness, but on the face of it he looks like your average kid, and personally I think the film would have worked better with someone a bit more foreboding in the lead role. Davison gets excellent support from Ernest Borgnine as his unsympathetic boss, and Borgnine manages to steal the show every time he appears on screen. The plot does move rather slowly, however, and the film cant really described as a thriller. The whole thing about Willard and his rats doesn't come through well either; we see him holding them, stroking them and talking to them but there's never really too much of a bond formed and the film constantly feels like it can't portray what it is that it wants to portray. There is something enjoyable about Willard though, the way it plods along means that it's easy to get into and it never became boring enough to make me want to reach for the remote. I have to say that the ending was a bit of disappointment, but you could do worse than this film I suppose.