PCT Movie Review: Willard's Revenge

Depending on how you look at it, the release of the recent movie Willard could be significant for pest management professionals. Reasons it may be useful include: boosting business by catering to the fears of easily unsettled prospective clients or providing you with the perfect movie to take your kids to if you’re tired of hearing them brag about what their friend’s dad, the nuclear physicist, does for a living. At the very least, Willard could provide PCOs with a good training film for worst-case scenarios. And we do mean worst case.

RATS’ REVENGE. A remake of the 1971 film of the same name, Willard is the story of a young man with a peculiar gift for communicating, teaching and training rats. Willard, played with over-the-top geeky gusto by Crispin Glover (best known as Michael J. Fox’s pop from Back to the Future), is an emotionally stunted man-child who is dominated by his invalid mother and malicious boss. He finds the only companionship he’s ever known when mom sends him to the basement to take care of the rat problem. Turns out, one person’s pest is another person’s best friend and Willard quickly bonds with a surprisingly brainy white rat he names Socrates. Socrates serves as Willard’s mouthpiece to the rest of the basement’s infesting community and before long all the neighborhood rats are taking refuge in Willard’s basement, where he trains them to exact revenge on a world that has left him out to dry. (It could happen.) Believe it or not, this all is established before things actually get bad.

The manifestation of "bad" arrives in the introduction of Ben, an unbelievably large rat with a bit of a superiority complex. Turns out he doesn’t like being bossed around or playing second fiddle to a little white know-it-all. And when Ben starts feeling insecure about his place, he allows his brawn to over-compensate for Socrates’ brains and all heck breaks loose.

Primarily a revenge movie, Willard plays like Dr. Doolittle crossed with Carrie. While hardly edge-of-your-seat scary, it succeeds in providing more than enough creepy gross-outs to make even the most jaded PCO a bit queasy.

By the movie’s second half we find ourselves adrift in a literal sea of rats (most of which are digitally rendered through the magic of computer generated effects) who do things like chew their way through garage doors, attack humans when prompted, devour the occasional feline (hilariously to the strains of the early-70s Michael Jackson pop tune, "Ben" from the soundtrack of the original film’s sequel of the same name), and justify any good PCO’s existence.

WHERE’S THE PCO? What this movie obviously needs in spades is a competent pest management professional, but nary a one makes an appearance in even a single frame of Willard. In fact, the topic of pest control isn’t even suggested until the movie’s last five minutes at which point flamethrowers begin to seem like the only answer. But, if you ever want to impress your family with what you face on the job every day (more or less – for your sake we’ll hope less) you could rent Willard and expect an extra hug before leaving the house every morning. Or better yet, pitching the movie to prospective clients couldn’t really do your bottom line any harm either. Willard, after all, does begin the movie trying to eradicate the pests with some simple drugstore- bought mousetraps and glue boards, and before you know it, the rats are running his life and he’s out of a job. This sends a nice "don’t let this happen to you" message to a misguided do-it-yourselfer who may have found a few droppings under his basement stairs.

So maybe the portrayal of high-functioning rats in Willard isn’t bursting with realism, but you don’t need to tell your customers that. It still provides some nasty escapist fun for PCOs who can surely appreciate just how inaccurate the movie is (thank heavens).

Though we suppose it’s better to be excluded than misrepresented (see: Mousehunt, Arachnophobia, etc.), it might have been nice to see a heroic pest control operator (played perhaps by Vin Diesel?) burst onto the scene in the last five minutes and save the day, but alas, PCOs will just have to keep waiting for a flattering portrayal of the pest control industry from Hollywood. Rats.