Word: ratting
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...recent vogue in animal horror flicks began last summer with Willard, the tender story of a boy's love for his pet rat, which eventually led the pack that ate him up. So successful was Willard, which grossed $8,200,000 last year, according to Variety, that it gave birth to a sequel rat saga, Ben, which is now on the drive-in circuit, and a Noah's ark of other horrors about crawlers and creepers...
From the moviemakers' point of view, one great advantage of animal flicks is the cheapness of casting; the average cost of the pictures is only about $1,000,000. "Since it takes only 21 days for a rat to have a litter of ten to twelve, we bought a dozen and left it up to them," says Moe Di Sesso, the trainer for Willard and Ben. By the time the company "of The Night of the Lepus arrived on location in Arizona, its rabbit contingent had increased by more than 10% and was about to rise again...
...quirks of nature promise to be the vampires' undoing. One is the fact that bats, like rats, are more sensitive than most mammals to the hemorrhagic properties of anticoagulants. These are the chemicals used medicinally to protect human victims of heart attacks and strokes against the recurrence of dangerous blood clotting; overdoses can cause fatal internal bleeding. The best known anticoagulant, warfarin, is used in calculated overdoses as a rat poison. In 1968 a two-nation team began work at the National Livestock Research Institute in Mexico City and the U.S. Department of the Interior's Wildlife Research...
...when last seen, had just set his loyal horde of fellow rats upon Willard, his misanthropic master. Willard ended, appropriately enough, with Willard's grisly demise, but Ben is back as busy as ever in this sleazy slice of horror for the pre-high school set. The basic conceit of both the rat and the ape pictures is that animals at worst are misunderstood and at best are infinitely preferable to humans. Ben pals around with a sickly kid named Danny who suf fers from a weak heart and, to judge by his actions in the movie, a weak...
...world summed up in a pipsqueak from South Philly, a monomaniacal revenger who finally kills Pilgrim for no good reason. Derby is executed for "stealing" a figurine from the Dresden rubble in order to replace an identical one broken by his son, While Lazarro survives the war rat-like, chewing off his own guts and using the bile he collects against mankind in general...