Ben (1972)

I suppose if you are going to make an horror movie, then it’s hard to beat rats as the culprits. The young, imaginative, “Danny” (Lee Montgomery) is a bit of a gentle loner who makes friends with a rat he names “Ben”. He tells his sister all about his new friend, but “Eve” (Meredith Baxter) just assumes he is making him up. Then some odd things start to happen in their neighbourhood, and rumours start to abound that there is a swarm of rats marauding around attacking people. When a grocery store is trashed by these vandalising critters, the police step in and “Kirkland” (Joseph Campanella) has to try and make sense of events that simply don’t add up. The more he looks for the beasts the less he finds, and when one of the lads that bullies “Lee” is reputedly attacked, even that doesn’t shed any light on things. Despite repeated and exhaustive searches of the subterranean pipes, sewers and drains, there is nothing! How are the authorities going to get to the bottom of things? The acting and the dialogue are all pretty mundane, true, but the sights of rats clambering and crawling everywhere, and the idea that there could be one more intelligent co-ordinating their behaviour is a genuinely quite spooky one. Like an army of ants only bigger, hairier, and with bigger teeth! It rather runs out of steam towards the end, but for a while the busy photography and the tension from the score create quite an unsettling atmosphere that might make you check under the bed and lock the windows before you go to sleep at night. The Michael Jackson title song got an Oscar nomination, it was made by Bing Crosby Productions and it’s not as bad as I’d initially feared.