“Ladies and gentlemen: you’re attention please! There is a herd of killer rabbits heading this way and we desperately need your help!”
I could pretty much end the review right there. I mean, what else needs to be said about a movie that can include that line?
Most bad movies at least have a decent concept. That is, you can see where someone would say “yeah, this could be good, have X-million dollars.” The most intriguing and thought-provoking thing about Night of the Lepus is the question “just who the heck thought that giant rabbits would make good movie monsters?”
I mean, can you picture what the pitch session must have been like for this movie? “I’ve got an idea: it’s a horror story about giant, man-eating bunny rabbits that attack a small Arizona community.” “Brilliant! Everyone’s afraid of rabbits, right? Here’s a couple thousand dollars!”
To be fair, the film was based on an actual book called Year of the Angry Rabbit by Russell Braddon (using the broadest possible definition of ‘based on’). To be fair to Mr. Braddon, the book was a satire; something no one associated with the film seems to have noticed (assuming any of them actually even read the book, which is doubtful). The movie itself was originally titled Rabbits before someone involved realized “wait a minute: rabbits aren’t scary!” Then, presumably, there was a long, awkward silence as everyone realized what they had done, followed by a frantic scramble to come up with a different name (“How about Night of the Bunnies?” “You’re fired.”).
The story goes that rancher Cole Hillman (Rory Calhoun) is having an explosion of rabbits destroying his ranch (and, in a very poorly staged scene, his horse…it breaks a leg in a rabbit hole and he has to shoot it). Unwilling to use poison, since this is the 1970s and echo-friendliness is all the rage, he turns to Drs Roy (Stuart Whitman) and Gerry Bennett (Janet Leigh) to find an alternative solution. They, assisted by Dr. Elgin Clark (DeForest Kelly, Star Trek’s Dr. McKoy) decide to try gene manipulation (poison is bad, but genetic tampering is a-okay), but due to the antics of their very annoying daughter, Amanda (Melanie Fullerton), one of the altered rabbits is released into the wild, resulting an unspecified amount of time later in a herd of ten-foot rabbits, who soon start dining on the local population. In case you were wondering, no, Amanda is never brought to task for causing the deaths of dozens of innocent people, and no, there is no explanation offered for why the rabbits have suddenly turned carnivorous: it’s just taken for granted that giant rabbits would eat people (okay, they actually just slather some red paint on them while leaving their bodies totally intact, but let’s pretend we don’t notice that). From then on, it’s a question of how the characters will kill the rabbits (“kill the wabbit! Kill the wabbit!” sorry). It’s a mark of the film’s intelligence that the first thing they try is sealing up the entrances to the mine where the rabbits are gathered (the stupidity of this approach is emphasized by the fact that one rabbit digs a new opening during that same scene…and opening that no one bothers to close, by the way).
This film is pretty much exactly what you’d expect when you hear the premise “giant killer bunny rabbits:” it’s a lot of repetitive scenes of cute, adorable bunnies hopping around miniature sets in slow motion while the music rather frantically tries to convince us that they are scary and impressive. Meanwhile, the actors gamely go through the motions, looking like they’re thinking of all the horrible things they’d like to do to their agents for landing them this picture. Make no mistake, the scariest thing in this movie are the recorded rabbit screams that are occasionally played over the attacking bunnies (though people with sensitive stomachs are also advised not to look directly at Janet Leigh’s wardrobe: what was up with Seventies fashions anyway?).
Words fail to express just how completely the movie backfires. It’s really a surreal experience seeing bunches of cute little rabbits bounding about to dramatic, solemn music and realizing that this is supposed to be scary. It’s as if you were told you were going to a serious medieval drama and accidentally got Monty Python and the Holy Grail, which you then sit through assuming that it is meant to be taken seriously (though the killer rabbit in that movie is a lot scarier than the ones here). Except that in this case it isn’t an accident: you remind yourself over and over again that someone, somewhere thought this was a good idea for a horror movie. Meanwhile, for all the attempts to make the rabbits into deadly menaces the stupidity of the human characters, coupled with repeated shots of cute, screaming rabbits being killed, means our sympathies are entirely with the rabbits (“Get ‘em, Hazel! Show Dr. McCoy who’s boss!”)
The thing is, though, even if you look past the cute widdle monsters, this would still be a pretty bad film. The writing is awful: characters pop in and out, appearing and disappearing as though a few pages of an earlier draft got mixed into the shooting schedule and no one noticed that the characters no longer serve any purpose or even have roles that overlap (how many medical specialists does one film need?). Characters repeatedly do stupid things: the aforementioned “let’s bury the animals known for their digging prowess” plan, the opening scene in which Hillman rides his horse straight into a clearly visible rabbit burrow (it’s done in a helicopter shot, and we can see the bloody thing from the helicopter!), the scene where characters hide from the rabbits in a basement…behind a thin wooden door…and then start shooting up at them as if to announce “here we are and you could easily come and kill us!” The editing, especially during the climax, is also terrible: the last ten minutes feel like the editing equivalent of when you give up on a picture and just scribble all over the page in frustration. As a matter of fact, that’s probably what it was: can you imagine being the editor for this thing? “Alright, John, it’s your job to make this film actually scary, now get to work, our careers are on the line.”
Then the film can’t even get rabbit biology right. In the first place, the rabbits we see are very clearly domestic rabbits: fat, slow, and multi-colored (there’s some attempt to justify this by claiming that a rabbit farm was released in the past, but it doesn’t really work). The rabbits are also mysteriously nocturnal, which real rabbits are not, and…well, I covered the whole ‘they eat meat’ thing, didn’t I? Then there’s the fact that the film offers two pronunciations of ‘Lepus’…and both are wrong (for the record, it’s pronounced the same as ‘leper’).
As I noted above, effects wise it’s mostly regular rabbits hopping happily about on miniature sets. For attack scenes they sometimes have a guy in a rabbit suit, which they rather desperately try to avoid showing (but it sneaks in sometimes and is an absolute riot when it does…though I don’t envy the poor guy who had to wrestle a horse in it). For post-attack victims, they just smear a lot of fake blood on them, and that’s it: there very clearly are no wounds whatsoever on their bodies, which are often rendered in loving close-ups so that we can study and make careful notes of the intactness of the skin. In one scene, a character is mauled by a rabbit, has his clothes soaked in blood, and then literally seconds later is up and running around like nothing happened. Folks, they just didn’t care. And can you blame them? They’re making a film about giant killer rabbits!
You might be able to tell that this is one of those movies that is bad, but a whole lot of fun as well. You just can’t help laughing at the frantic attempts to make rabbits into terrifying monsters, while the rabbits themselves merely wiggle their noses and hop around in a rather confused manner, as if they themselves were mildly bemused by the situation. There are a lot of little pleasures in the film, such as the way no one in town questions the sheriffs warning of giant killer rabbits (as quoted above), but enthusiastically rush to follow orders. Not one person so much as asks for a clarification that they’re actually fighting giant bunny rabbits. Actually, no one in the film really expresses much objection to the idea: the sheriff goes along with it, as does the National Guard. No one so much as cracks a grin or sniggers at the thought of being attacked by the Easter Bunny: they just take it completely in stride (there’s a moment where the sheriff orders a deputy to call up the governor and ask for the National Guard. I would have loved to hear that call). I also like the way the commander of the National Guard unit still bellows into his megaphone even when it’s pointing directly at his subordinates two feet away (the national guard itself, meanwhile, consists mostly of stock-footage from The War of the Worlds, meaning, amusingly enough, that the Arizona National Guard is apparently almost twenty years behind the regular army in terms of equipment).
Personally, my favorite character in the film is the unnamed helicopter pilot, who has no lines but who throughout the proceedings wears the most epically bored expression that you will ever see (the repeated use of the helicopter itself, meanwhile, indicate that renting it took up a decent amount of the film’s budget). I also was frankly amused that the rabbit army was dealt with using essentially the same tactic used at the end of Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, so apparently someone working on the film was a man of letters and learning. And at the end is the unanswered and intriguing question, “so, what did the town do with hundreds of giant rabbit carcasses? Become the rabbit-stew and fur-coat capital of the West?”
Not much else to say really: this is one of those classically bad movies that you can’t help loving, even while you tear it to shreds. The sight people screaming in horror at the sight of enormous bunnies will add years to your life. Add in the numerous opportunities to make Watership Down references, and you have a great party film to pop in and laugh yourself to the floor at.
Oh, and in case you were wondering, yes the film does indeed end with a dramatic shock-zoom on a rabbit chewing grass in a sinister manner, no doubt plotting cruel vengeance in its cute, fuzzy little mind (I swear, I am not making that up: that really is the last shot of the film). That they failed to add a “duhn-duhn-duhn” chord seems to have been simple oversight.
Final Rating: 2/5. An awful movie by any standard, but hilariously so. Recommended for anyone looking for a classic bad movie to have some fun with.
Suggested alternate title:
Watership Down 3: The Armageddon
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