Word: willard
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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...
...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...
Rats are the easiest to work with. For Willard, Di Sesso trained them to run toward their food, mostly peanut butter, at the sound of a beeper. When it came time for the rats to start munching on Star Ernest Borgnine, who was smeared with peanut butter, they were even polite enough to stop with the peanut butter. The rabbits, by contrast, appear never to have heard of Pavlov. "We trained them in California to associate food with clicking sounds, so that they would head in any direction you clicked from," says Lepus Producer A.C. Lyles. "When...
...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...
Some things can be done to avert a showdown. Companies in danger of bumping against their profit-margin ceilings could pour more money into such activities as advertising and research and development, thereby reducing immediate profits but also perhaps increasing their share of the market. Willard F. Rockwell Jr., chairman of Rockwell Manufacturing Co., Pittsburgh-based maker of valves, meters and power tools, views the necessity of complying with margin ceilings as a chance to "give my competitors a good kick in the pants...