This is the story of a lonely boy and his rat. I cried like a baby at the end when the Micheal Jackson version of this song started playing. Part of that could be due to the weird resonance having a young M.J. singing the song lends to this film. He was also a greatly misunderstood soul.
This really is an odd little story, Ben is not painted as evil, just needing to find a place for his humongous family. There are many humorous scenes in this, such as women in towels running out of a health spa from rats (why? the rats don't care that you're in a state of undress)! Seeing a young Meredith Baxter stumbling along and losing her glasses in a filthy sewer is fun too.
There is much inadvertent hilarity to be gained from watching this too, such as six foot tall grown men apparently succumbing to maybe six rats climbing on them and dying for no apparent reason.
Let's not forget the scene with the detective commenting on the whacked out truck driver "I've seen people like this before, up in (somewhere in the U.S. mid-west) after pulling dead bodies out of a mine". WTF! Not to mention a rat being able to both read and understand the word "pesticide" written on a cheery yellow box! There's also rats unscrewing air-vents and riding on toy trains!
"Ben" has some serious pacing issues. The mini-recap at the beginning of Ben over-seeing Willard's death, was OK, but it's nearly a half hour into the film when Ben and Danny become friends, and the time in-between is interminably long. Danny and Ben seem to have been friends for about two days when the former writes "Ben's song". Quite rushed! Most of the middle is fairly good, even though things like the puppet show and Danny composing Ben's song drag a bit. Then at the end it just seems to go on forever. The last twenty minutes of this film, which felt like an eternity, is a horrible affair of flame throwers and the squeals of countless rats! The rats are so cute, especially Ben, that is is truly a gut-wrenching thing to watch.
There are very nice portraits of relationships here, especially Danny and his family, and Danny and Ben, which made the characters seem real enough to get me emotionally invested. The story of their friendship is truly beautiful.
In closing, this is not a go-to horror movie. It's not exactly a horror movie, though it mostly is in tone, and it's not exactly a drama either. This is a good movie for when you don't feel like you have a true friend in the world. Even Ben got a friend who loved him enough to risk his life, though he was a monster to everyone else.
This really is an odd little story, Ben is not painted as evil, just needing to find a place for his humongous family. There are many humorous scenes in this, such as women in towels running out of a health spa from rats (why? the rats don't care that you're in a state of undress)! Seeing a young Meredith Baxter stumbling along and losing her glasses in a filthy sewer is fun too.
There is much inadvertent hilarity to be gained from watching this too, such as six foot tall grown men apparently succumbing to maybe six rats climbing on them and dying for no apparent reason.
Let's not forget the scene with the detective commenting on the whacked out truck driver "I've seen people like this before, up in (somewhere in the U.S. mid-west) after pulling dead bodies out of a mine". WTF! Not to mention a rat being able to both read and understand the word "pesticide" written on a cheery yellow box! There's also rats unscrewing air-vents and riding on toy trains!
"Ben" has some serious pacing issues. The mini-recap at the beginning of Ben over-seeing Willard's death, was OK, but it's nearly a half hour into the film when Ben and Danny become friends, and the time in-between is interminably long. Danny and Ben seem to have been friends for about two days when the former writes "Ben's song". Quite rushed! Most of the middle is fairly good, even though things like the puppet show and Danny composing Ben's song drag a bit. Then at the end it just seems to go on forever. The last twenty minutes of this film, which felt like an eternity, is a horrible affair of flame throwers and the squeals of countless rats! The rats are so cute, especially Ben, that is is truly a gut-wrenching thing to watch.
There are very nice portraits of relationships here, especially Danny and his family, and Danny and Ben, which made the characters seem real enough to get me emotionally invested. The story of their friendship is truly beautiful.
In closing, this is not a go-to horror movie. It's not exactly a horror movie, though it mostly is in tone, and it's not exactly a drama either. This is a good movie for when you don't feel like you have a true friend in the world. Even Ben got a friend who loved him enough to risk his life, though he was a monster to everyone else.