Here’s the Movie Patton Oswalt Calls ‘Incel Ratatouille’
Anyone can cook, but not everyone can turn a mischief of rats into a man-eating death squad.
The central premise of Ratatouille is one of those plots that, even 17 years after the film’s release, the internet can’t stop discussing, because it’s so novel and ridiculous that memes about it never get old. In the Pixar classic, a loser loner partners with an intelligent rat who helps him solve his career problems before the rodent recruits an entire horde of organized vermin who physically overpower the host’s enemies.
Now, that synopsis may read like the plot of a C- horror film, and that’s because it is — 36 years before Ratatouille made human-rat relationships cute and culinary, the cult favorite horror film Willard did something similar.
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Earlier this week, Ratatouille star and stand-up comedy legend Patton Oswalt finally got around to watching the presumed inspiration behind his biggest film to date, noting that, in the original version of the story, Linguini seems to have an even more complicated relationship with “females.”
In the 1971 film Willard, Bruce Davison plays the titular 27-year-old social outcast who lives with his ailing mother and works at the company his late father founded, but was stolen out from under the family by Ernest Borgnine. When his mom asks him to solve the pest problem in their dilapidated mansion, Willard instead takes pity on the rats he’s tasked to kill and befriends the mischief, even naming his favorites. In response to Borgnine antagonizing Willard and attempting to pressure him into selling his family’s home to the same swindler who’s running the family company, Willard wields the loyal, organized rats like a strike team as they crash parties, chew through locked doors and help him steal cash to cover his mortgage after Willard’s mom dies.
However, Willard’s experiment goes awry when Borgnine kills Willard’s favorite rat, leading to a tense confrontation in which the rats maul Borgnine and cause him to fall out a window to his death before they eat the flesh off of his bones. Horrified, Willard attempts to capture and drown the man-eating rat army he created, but enough survive to exact revenge, murder Willard, and set up a sequel in which Michael Jackson performs the theme song, a baller move that Pixar probably could have pulled off if they had only moved quickly on a possible Ratatouille 2.
Both Willard and it’s follow-up film Ben are cult classics, which makes it surprising that weird-media-lover Oswalt hadn’t seen the original Ratatouille in all its absurdity. There was even a remake of Willard in 2003 starring Crispin Glover as the title outcast, in case man-eating rats weren’t creepy enough.
Ultimately, though, Oswalt’s assessment of Willard isn’t completely accurate — can it really be considered “Incel Ratatouille” if the rats only brutally murder men?
