"Willard" is a glitzy remake of the 1971 movie starring Bruce Davison as the title character, a man who is friendless and lonely with a domineering mother and a boss from hel. Director Morgan, having received the rights to Gilbert Ralston's novel after an eight- months' legal struggle, gives the moviegoing public a surprisingly potent, darkly comic fable that could be called The Revenge of the Nerd. Just as no one but Bruce Willis could have done justice to the role of Lt. A.K. Waters in Antoine Fuqua's "Tears of the Sun," only Crispin Glover has the ideal sinister look of a psycho who barely represses his justifiable violence until his humiliating boss makes the fatal misstep of firing him.

Whereas the 1971 version, based as well on Stephen Gilbert's "Ratman's Notebooks," was so wispy that it could have fit on the stage of one of New York's shoddier off-off Broadway houses, this time around "Willard" gets the full Hollywood treatment with hundreds of computer-generated rats joining Willard's best friend, a white mouse, and its darker, larger second cousin Ben. Here is a tale of alienation, humiliation and revenge which is sly, only slightly campy, and surprisingly engrossing throughout. What puts this tale above the gross-out adolescent horror pics is that the campiness is properly toned down, the slice-and-dice convention is virtually absent, and Glover is next to amazing in a role that he was born to play.

Watching Crispin Glover as the title character working in a funereal suit day after day (while others are dressed casually as would be more appropriate in the dismal spaces of a manufacturing plant) recalls the actor in a thinner role recently as Bartleby based on the Herman Melville novella and often played by small theatrical groups. Whereas Bartleby would "prefer not to" each time the boss asks him to do something, Willard desperately needs to hold on to his job preparing purchase orders for the plant now being run by Frank Martin (R. Lee Ermey) since Martin's partner and Willard's father had died. Because Willard's mother, Henrietta Stiles (Jackie Burroughs with so many wrinkles she could be used as a "before" shot in a Botox ad), is ill, Willard must take special care of her and is often late to work. Poorly treated by the boss who cannot fire him because of a contract the employer made with Willard's father Willard is eager for revenge and, having discovered a basement loaded with rats that breed faster than rabbits, he trains the creatures in preparation for their use as hit rats.

Each of the principals stands out for a distinct personality. Laura Elena Harring (the bombshell brunette from "Mulholland Drive"?) is the caring, sympathetic co-worker who tries to befriend the unhappy Willard against the machinations of the angry boss played well by R. Lee Ermey, who in one scene reaches distractedly for his computer mouse and ends up holding a real one. Jackie Burroughs is the mother that only a son could love, with the face of a Shar-Pei, who badgers her son so much to find a girl friend (which is the last thing she really wants him to do) that Willard doesn't know whether to help tuck a pillow under her head or press it down over it.

"Willard" is a horror movie that properly downplays the traditional horror aspects (the rats are not all that scary) but instead does the right thing in punctuating the unusual character of its title figure, with the rodents serving principally as a metaphor for the man's inner turmoil.