He's creepy in that quietly threatening way that makes you wrap your arms tighter around loved ones. He lives in a dilapidated castle of a mansion with his wheezing, sickly mother. It's disturbingly obvious that this individual is either on the crumbling edge of sanity, and if he's not, it's because he jumped long before we got there. And he's out for blood. This could serve as a fairly loose interpretation of Hitchcock's Norman Bates from "Psycho." But the one I describe deserves one more little nail-biting, shiver-inducing detail: he holds power over hordes of rats. This is the basic premise of Glen Morgan's revenge-ridden, rat-loving, freak-fest of a remake, "Willard," based on the 1971 cult-smash of the same name.\nAtmospherically filmed in an upsettingly slightly-polished filth that would have David Fincher singing certain Christina Aguilera panty-anthems, Morgan's "Willard" is stylish creep-show fun with just enough complexity to make it worth the ticket-price. Crispin Glover turns in one of his best performances as the socially maladjusted peon who uses his newfound flair to wreak rat-writhing revenge on his ceaselessly ingratiating boss, Frank Martin,
\nplayed to overacting annoyance by R. Lee Ermey. The sole reason to mention Ermey's overacting, which at times works, is because Glover turns in an emotionally wracking performance, full of quivering twitches and near-ejaculatory eruptions of fury, that seems frighteningly the furthest thing from overacting. \nGlover, the ever-eccentric man/child of Tinseltown, seems born for this part, and becomes nearly inseparable from his only furry friends. An interesting trivial note, Glover released a book in 1999 called The Art of Rat Catching, in which he basically illustrated and word-collaged the text of a 19th century book on dealing with vermin. I doubt this is a coincidence.\nMorgan's newer "Willard" comes off as a cheese-ball assimilation somewhere between the world of Hitchcock's "The Bird's" and "Psycho." The free-floating camera of Morgan gives the film its haunted feel, along with an elaborately-nasty art design, and Morgan is unafraid of moving into extreme close-ups that become chokingly claustrophobic, uncomplimentary and feel on the verge of an explosion, which is exactly why they work. And amidst all of the terror-tickling shenanigans, an unexpected complexity of character emerges. Watch the power relationships between the world-weary Willard and the one thing he believes he has control over. While the film is nowhere near deep, it has more depth than the shallow puddles of schlock we've been served in the past.
