Movie Review: Night of the Lepus
Happy Holidays, gang! I was looking and looking for some horrible movie to review for today, and I had all about given up until I remembered that one of my friends had a copy of the only Giant Killer Bunny movie I’ve ever seen (albeit a bootleg copy – note the “TBS” sign in the corner of every shot). Luckily for you (or unluckily depending on how you look at it) I called him up and was able to convince him that I wouldn’t spill soda on the tape. As a warning, the quality of the tape isn’t the best, but the movie isn’t of the highest caliber either. I guess that makes it all ok. So, for your Easter reading pleasure, I present to you…
The movie opens with a news report about rabbit overpopulation in the southern half of the US. This is apparently a bad thing, since the rabbits will destroy crops, or at the very least drown the world in Cadbury Creme Eggs. The farmers and diabetics of the world are running out of solutions to this problem, and only one man may be able to help them. That man of course is…
"Dammit Jim! I'm a doctor, not a B movie actor!"
DeForest Kelly, apparently needing a job, is Mr. Clark, the man with the connections. The farmers don’t want to poison the rabbits away because that will ruin their crops, but they’re running out of solutions and apparently the man to talk to is Mr. Clark. Clark recalls that there is someone that may be able to help. They are the Bennetts, and they are a family living out here from the Eastern US on an exchange program. Clark goes out to meet them at a nearby cave where they are capturing bats to study.
Meet the world's worst scientist and his family.
There are the Bennetts – Roy and Gerry, and their daughter Amanda – and they may have the solution to the rabbit problem that has sprung up in the area. See previously the only solution they were using was to have lots of guys go out and shoot them with shotguns. Now, that may seem like an excellent idea, but we’re not dealing with 20 rabbits… we’re dealing with thousands and thousands of rabbits. And since they seem to have learned how to hunt rabbits from Elmer Fudd, it’s doubtful they’ve killed even ten of the rabbits successfully. So what is the solution that Roy has come up with? Hormones. He will inject the rabbits with hormones in order to slow or even stop their population growth. How will he do this? Well, Amanda asks the same thing and I don’t think I can explain this any better than how Mrs. Bennett explains it.
“We’re trying to make Jack a little more like Jill and Jill a little more like Jack so they wouldn’t keep having such large families.”
So basically, they’re going to make the rabbits stop having sex and therefore stopping the population from growing. That seems like a perfectly sound idea. But, of course that won’t make a very good movie, so let’s see what goes wrong with this amazing plan.
The experiments begin.
After obtaining a small group of these rabbits, the Bennets try injecting a test group with Roy’s hormone mixture, with less than stellar results. Their immune systems can’t handle it, and they get sick. This is where amazingly bad idea #1 occurs. Instead of following any scientific method I’ve ever heard of, Roy decides he will inject one of the rabbits with a serum he has gotten through the mail. A serum with unknown properties… wait a second. What just happened? Roy the scientist just injected a rabbit with a serum that will have no known results at all, and thinks it might stop the overpopulation problem?! Now, I am not a scientist, but I did own a Mad Scientist Food Lab, so I think I can safely say I’m an expert on this subject. And although none of the Food Lab food was any good, I sure as hell didn’t pour random shit into the jars because I thought it might make the orange fizz taste less like soap. However, as long as the rabbit doesn’t get out of the lab there won’t be any accidents, right? WRONG.
Amanda, the daughter, decides she loves the rabbit which was injected, and she switches it with an uninjected rabbit. Then she convinces her dad to let her keep the bunny as a pet, which he does, and walks out of the lab with the injected rabbit. This can’t be a good thing. Well, as long as she doesn’t let it go or anything…
... crap.
Well, that can’t be a good thing. Well, as long as nothing happens to the injected bunnies that are still in the lab, then we’ll still be ok, right?
... crap in a hat.
The rabbits that have been injected with the serum are growing. You see the smaller rabbit on the left? That rabbit is the normal sized rabbit, and the other rabbit is the freak mutant rabbit. Well… this can’t be a good thing, but it might just be a moot point, because the farmers have decided to ignore Roy’s possible solution and burn their fields to kill the rabbits. So the mutant rabbit will die with the rest of them, and nobody will ever know what happened.
Mmmm. I love the smell of burning fur in the morning.
The first sign that there is a problem is that some huge prints of an unidentified animal are found on the burned ground when the farmers come back the next day. But, the farmers quickly dismiss these prints as a mountain lion, and go about the business of reworking the burned fields. In all honesty, I’m sure I’d do the same thing, since the idea of mutated rabbits seems incredibly far fetched, and the farmers don’t know that Amanda stole the infected bunny, and then dropped it. Speaking of Amanda, I wonder what she’s doing now?
She and a friend are out wandering around the countryside and they stop by Captain Billy’s shack, which is located by a large underground tunnel. The Captain is nowhere to be found, however, so the kids decide to go check out the nearby tunnels, where the Captain normally hangs out… or something. Do they find him? Sort of.
In one of the worst scenes in monster movie history, Amanda finds the body of Captain Billy, which is being eaten by a group of large rabbits. I would have a picture of this scene, but it’s not fucking possible, since there is no picture of a rabbit eating a man. Instead we have a bunch of shots of Amanda screaming, the body of a man, and a bunch of close up shots of rabbit heads. How big are the rabbits? We don’t know, but to eat a man, I think it’s a safe bet to guess that they’re fairly large. Amanda runs out screaming and blacks out, and the movie switches to her screaming in bed, with everyone gathered around her. She wakes up, but still doesn’t tell anyone what she saw… which leads to the next attack scene.
This is truck driver, John "Dead Meat" Doe.
This truck driver has some sort of refrigerator problem in his truck, and decides to go check on it. While he is checking out his vegetable shipment he hears a sound behind him, and he turns to see… large rabbits, which kill and eat him and his truck of vegetables, angering Food Lion consumers everywhere. Now, this movie obviously spent all its budget on getting Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy to play a small part in it, so they didn’t have any money left to make any huge rabbit costumes or anything, so they took normal shots of rabbits and slowed them down to make them look slow and lumbering. A cheap technique, and it’s actually not too bad, except what do you do when you have to have the rabbits interact with people? Back to that later, because more people are being found dead around town, and look to have been attacked by some sort of large animal.
This is where scientists again prove me wrong about stereotypes. Normally I think of scientists as believers in realism. However, the scientists in this movie believe all these attacks are being caused by a group of vampires or sabertooth tigers, both of which are either not real or extinct. At least say, “I think it might be angry bears looking for picnic baskets,” or anything better than vampires. But just as the town is getting ready to buy garlic and wooden stakes, another scientist decides that giant rabbits caused this. That seems impossible, but then Roy Bennett lets eveyone know about his giant rabbits he was breeding in the lab. One must have escaped so they’ve ordered poisons and explosives… they’ve got some giant rabbits to kill!
They go back to the tunnel by the recently deceased Captain Billy’s house, and load it up with dynamite. The tracks they found all seem to lead to this area, and it is believed all the tunnels are connected to this one large tunnels. So if they blow up the tunnels, then the rabbits will blow up too. But before they can set the charges, one of the rabbits digs his way out of the ground and attacks!
Note the red paint on his hands!
This is obviously a stuffed rabbit doll, that they used along with a brown furry suit that is flashed by so quickly that it almost doesn’t let us see how shitty the costume really is. The rabbit attacks one of the farmers, but he is driven off by a few shotgun blasts, and the farmers decide to finish off the bloodthirsty rabbits by setting off the charges, and burying the rabbits under the ground.
This must have set them back about 4 dollars.
Now a second ago, the rabbit just dug his way out of the ground to attack. So do you think burying them was a great plan? No it wasn’t. And later that evening the rest of the town discovers what a bad idea it was.
Such a shitty effect.
The rabbits dig their way out of the ground… and they’re hungry and pissed off! They attack the town, killing and eating the horses, and then continue looking for food. And what is it that giant bunnies like to eat? Why, people, of course! The townspeople all hide in a cellar to wait out the rabbit stampede, but the rabbits are smarter than they expect. They know the people are in the houses, and they aren’t just going to wait outside. Like a scene from some retarded Night of the Living Dead remake, the rabbits burst through the windows, the ceilings, the floors and begin to fill the houses searching for the tasty people inside.
A much less shitty effect...but still shitty
Many of the locals become rabbit food that evening, but Roy Bennett is still here, and ready to continue the fight against the horrors he created. But now he’s got more support. It seems word of this giant rabbit problem somehow got leaked out. Now, even in a relatively good news day, I think most people might be interested in a plague of giant bunnies. A collection of sheriffs from nearby towns meet with Roy and it is decided to call in a force that can’t fail. They use their powers as law officials to call in :
The A-Team!!
That’s right, America’s favorite crime-fighting team who was charged with a crime they didn’t commit! They devise a plan to attack the rabbits using an armored car they build from spare parts that happened to be laying around town. Then they scare the rabbits with a supply of fireworks they have, and the rabbits shrink back down to normal size, and the town is saved. B.A. Baracus then drinks the milk given to him by Hannibal which puts him to sleep and the A-Team flies away, mission accomplished.
You wish that was how this ends. Instead of the A-Team (or even Remington Steele), the townspeople call in the National Guard. The plan is to wait until nightfall, and then destroying the rabbits when they move out of hiding. The rabbits appear to be heading east, and the idea they come up with is so amazingly stupid, that it just can’t fail. In between the next town and the rabbits is a train track. They decide the best way to stop the rabbits advance is to flood the track with electricity, making an electric fence that the rabbits will be afraid to pass. Does it work? Yes, and better than any of them ever imagined.
SHOCKING!
The rabbits continue to run at the tracks and getting electrocuted while the National Guard manages to shoot any stragglers. The ground covered in mounds of dead giant killer rabbit, the world has been saved from a race of evil killer rabbits. Thank god, it’s over.
This movie is incredibly slow and boring. Even during the “action scenes”, the movie was just a constant stream of close up shots of rabbits, people screaming, and a horrible brown furry suit. This is the only thing that I feel I couldn’t fully cover in this article. This fursuit is just plain awful, but if you just look at a picture of it, it doesn’t look nearly as bad as it should. Instead of having someone at least crouch down and move like a rabbit, the person in the suit walks around like a normal human, but dressed like some sort of furry. It’s just plain awful, but it made it possible for me to watch this pile more than once.
Hey, it’s no killer easter bunny movie, but it’s as close as I could find. In any case, hope you have a good Christmas, and if you don’t celebrate Christmas, I hope you have a good day… or something.
