Night of the Lepus (1972)

1972
Directed by William F. Claxton
Starring Stuart Whitman, Janet Leigh, Rory Calhoun and DeForest Kelley

Get ready for one of my favorite overused points that I make here on the blog:  Sometimes, ordinary things can be the scariest things of all.  All you have to do is inject some mutation, weird science, or some other fancy contraption to just about any creature that exists on Earth and you can accomplish just that.  Occasionally, you don't even have to do that.  Things like spiders and sharks are always scary.  And then there are things that have been horrifying at some point in the planet's existence.  Proof?  There used to be beetles the size of poodles that roamed the deserts during the days of the dinosaurs.  Just the thought of this makes me want to curl up into the fetal position.

Which brings me to Night of the Lepus, a.k.a. Killer Bunnies: The Movie.  This is another one of those creature-fied horror flicks that used to get a lot of play on TBS when I was a kid.  Back then, it used to f**kin' TERRIFY me, and I wish I was making that up.  Rabbits are adorable.  The rabbits in this movie ain't.  Of course, this was when I was, like, eight years old.  And when this movie finally got a home video release in 2005, I couldn't pick it up fast enough.

Spoiler alert: it sucks.

I know that's not news to a lot of people, because this is one of the most laughed-at movies of all time.  Hell, it even got the Rifftrax treatment a few years back.  For starters, it's not scary.  At all.  It's also got what amounts to an amazing crop of actors for a movie about giant mutated killer rabbits, but sadly that cast is wasted, because they all look like they'd rather be anywhere else in the world than filming this movie.

Anyone who has seen a "Nature Run Amok" movie kind of knows the drill about where we're going with Night of the Lepus.  So, let's try and make this as quick and painless as possible.  Our star character is rancher Cole Hillman (Calhoun, significantly less nutty than in his later Farmer Vincent persona), good ol' boy who is concerned about the thousands of rabbits that have taken up residence on his property.  Help comes in the form of college president Elgin Clark (DeForest Kelley) and a pair of researchers played by Stuart Whitman and Janet Leigh.  Amazingly, Leigh was still quite the looker in 1972. 

Our "weird science" portion of the movie begins here as the researchers capture several of the rabbits for experimentation, injecting one of them with a weird serum while their daughter falls in love with the captured bunny.  She keeps it as a pet, but it soon escapes, and this is where the s**t hits the fan.  Within short order, Whitman and Leigh's daughter takes a trek out to a local cave where they see one of the rabbits with blood smeared on its face and making the trademark 1970s shrieky "scream" soundtrack noise.  Yeah, you know the one.  Imagine Quint's fingernails scratching the chalkboard and mix it with the yelping of a dying cat if you don't.

Now, I will give it to the movie here.  It moves along at a nice, brisk pace.  88 minutes long, very little wasted motion, plenty of kills.  There's a few offshoot hick characters connected to rancher Cole who get to bite it once the bunnies start to invade the farm, with one of them getting to see the rabbits' massive teeth in a sequence that gave me nightmares as a child.  Yeah, this was the movie's money scene, and everything that follows is pretty much secondary.  The director had some pretty grand ambitions, as the rabbits go from the ranch to a nearby town, a big-time massacre sequence in said town, and threaten to invade a much LARGER nearby town in the process before our heroes put together the most epic electrocution plot ever to save the day.  Having seen the movie, take my word - it's not as much fun as it sounds.

The rabbits themselves are shot mainly through the art of forced perspective photography, shooting them in close-up against smaller backgrounds to make them look bigger.  Attack scenes were sometimes even done with human actors in rabbit costumes.  And folks, that...is awesome.  The beasts definitely don't look the greatest, but I admire th effort.  The laugh quotient here with the giant bunnies is somewhere around a 64%.

What ISN'T so admirable here is the acting.  And boy, is it bad.  There's a YouTube reel out there that contains the best stuff from the movie, and a lot of it is centered on  Calhoun, Kelley, Whitman, Leigh and the rest of the yokels.  They're either screaming stuff very unconvincingly, or shoving out all the exposition in bits that are stilted to the max.  As such, this isn't a movie where you get emotionally invested.  Calhoun in particular always has this William Shatner-esque "What...the hell...am I doing?" look on his face, but the other dudes aren't far behind.  Maybe Kelley transported Captain Kirk's brain into the other actors on the set (/dodges tomatoes).

Becuase the movie at least KIND OF works on its intended level, I'm not giving it my lowest rating.  It's also pretty funny.  The aforementioned Rifftrax version of this movie is proof of that, as there's plenty of material and unintentionally dumb bunny attack scenes to be had.  But it doesn't work as anything other than a dumb monster movie.  Thus, let's give this flick * 1/2 out of ****.  Still worth a watch or a cheap buy on DVD.