Crispin Glover was born to star as Willard. Yeah, I know it’s a remake, but still, this is the role he was born to play. Glover is—in every sense of the word—Willard, a friendless, henpecked only child caring for his decrepit mother and hating his miserable existence at both work and home.

So socially inept is Willard that he forges a deep, loving bond with a white rat he finds in his basement and dubs Socrates. He promises to never let anyone harm Socrates and invites him to share his bed. Willard’s kindness to rodents brings them out of the woodwork, literally, and he spends his nights training them to obey his every command ("Up!" “Down!” “In!” “Out!” “Tear!"). When his boss (R. Lee Ermey, effective in yet another insufferable ***censored*** part) humiliates him one too many times in front of co-workers, Willard exacts some rat revenge by ordering his tailed charges to gnaw on the tires of Ermey’s new Mercedes. Before long, Willard’s madness has escalated to the point that he forgets about tires and sics them on Ermey instead.

As the film begins, Glover makes Willard entirely sympathetic. By the end, you don’t love the character so much as his grip on sanity weakens, but all the while, Glover throws his entire manic energy into it, giving a true performance similar to the kind Nicolas Cage did before he sold out. The movie itself is well-made and fun to watch, funny instead of scary, but it does run out of ideas by the final 30 minutes. The digital rats don’t look too bad, and though there are hundreds of them, they could have attacked more people for my money. Still, why this failed at the box office while director James Wong’s earlier Final Destination hit paydirt is beyond me.

The DVD boasts a feature-length documentary on the yearlong process of bringing Willard to life, plus a “Rats: Friend or Foe?” segment and a music video of Glover reprising Ben, the treachly song The Jackson 5 sang for the original film. It’s the strangest three minutes you’ll see until David Lynch makes something else.

Rod Lott is the publisher of Hitch Magazine: The Journal of Pop Culture Absurdity.