Taken from the case files of the League of Reluctant Reviewers comes this bizarre tale of giant cute and cuddly bunny rabbits running amok and eating more than carrots.
“Good evening Mr. Bolton. It has been a while. He will see you in the library.”
Yes, it had been quite some time since I last visited the old brownstone on 999 Transient Street. When I joined the League of Reluctant Reviewers I didn’t know what I was getting myself in to. I needed a break. Now I was back.
I handed my coat to Chalmers, the butler, and took the stairs to the library on the second floor. It was not that I hated visiting the old man, but every visit brought something unpleasant. The pay was good, do not get me wrong, but sometimes money just is not enough. I gathered my sangfroid as I opened the door to the library.
“Welcome, come in, come in,” said the unmistakable voice coming from the Chippendale wing chair facing the fireplace. “It has been a while. Come. Sit. This one is not so bad this time.” A hand flashed from the right side of the chair, pointing to the Camelback settee where my usual drink was waiting. I walked over and sat down and took a sip of my Tom and Jerry, then leaned back and made myself comfortable. While I waited I stared at the carvings in the walnut coffee table. They seemed to change on every visit. Odd.
The old man rang for Chalmers, who brought him the DVD. “I think this one will prove less daunting and dispiriting than the last ones, so you may find it an easy, if somewhat unnecessary, time waster. Zombos will not touch it. And that good for nothing butler he has will not bother, either. So they will pay handsomely for your review.”
He tossed it over to me. It was the Blu-ray for Night of the Lepus, also known as Rabbits. I finished my Tom and Jerry, nodded to Chalmers, and followed him out of the library, down the stairs, and into my coat and out the door. At least the old man was right: it was an unnecessary time waster; but giant cuddly rabbits standing in for ravenous monsters was lame enough for me to be able to coast on this one.
See it for DeForest Kelley and his mustache. See it for Stuart Whitman (The Monster Club‘s last victim). See it for Janet Lee (Psycho‘s first victim). Better yet, don’t see it and read the novel, The Year of the Angry Rabbit by Russell Braddon, instead. Director William F. Claxton, who at better times did Bonanza, The Twilight Zone, The Rifleman, and many other television shows, clearly didn’t have any luck with this turkey. It’s not that the direction is so bad, with many poor choices, but…no, hell, it really is bad.
He seems to stick with a television pacing for imaginary commercials and doesn’t show much style or cognizance of what a horror movie or science fiction movie should be. Performances, key action moments, and, especially, the awful closeups of bunnies running amok on miniature sets is more funny than terrifying. Zooming in on those bucktooth mouths surrounded by twitching whiskers, smeared with a little goopy stage blood, makes you want to reach out and pet the rabbits more than recoil in horror. Going the extra mile to really annoy you, we see stunt people in rabbit costumes for clippy-edited action scenes where people are mauled in groan-inducing flashes. Which brings me to wonder how, given the rabbits are supposedly ravenous and eating everything in their path, they just maul people without chewing on them even a little bit.
Before we even get into the movie, there’s a 1950s-styled documentary introduction on how rabbit populations in Australia are out of control (tossing in some stock footage), which then ties into our story in Arizona, being overrun by the little varmints as they propagate and decimate the grazing land for cattle. Various methods are tried to stop the rabbits, but rancher Cole Hillman (Rory Calhoun) needs one that doesn’t poison the environment or his cattle. He goes to the local college and enlists the aid of Elgin Clark (DeForest Kelley), who directs him to Roy Bennett (Stuart Whitman) and his wife, Gerry Bennett (Janet Leigh), to research the problem. Their daughter quickly follows the blame-the-kid-trope when a new genetics-modifying chemical comes in that Roy injects a rabbit with, but she thinks the cute little thing needs rescue and swaps rabbits, tricking her parents into giving her the test rabbit. Another kid she’s palling around with let’s the rabbit free and it escapes down a rabbit hole. Cue the thousands of giant bunnies that suddenly appear in record time looking for carrots and more. What follows is uninspired rote mayhem, stock footage badly edited in, and lots of cute bunnies trying to look ferocious by hopping around in slow motion. Very slow motion.
The giant hoppers are found nesting in an abandoned cave. Dynamite is brought in to blow them up. In an oddly elongated process, Roy insists on going into the cave to try and grab a bunny to take a blood sample, but they keep moving away from him. So he just keeps going deeper into the cave. Did I mention about dynamite? Finally, he sees them and takes a few photographs (man, a cell phone would have been handy, right?) and they start chasing after him. Or so we assume, because the editing between rabbits and humans is clipped to near visual incoherence. This hunt and chase is drawn out so we really really want the dynamite to go off with him in or out of the cave. There is no tension, no suspense, and no emotional involvement as directed by Claxton.
But with so many rabbit feet around, they sure are lucky. They escape and keep breeding in record time, growing to monstrous proportions, or so I assume. The scaling across miniatures and action scenes does not appear to be synchronized well, as you may start thinking just how big they are from one scene to another, especially when they attack people. The acting has no highs or lows. These are good actors with track records in television westerns, but as played out, everyone seems on the same clock ticking slowly. Soon the herd of rabbits is heading for town, attacking people along the way. Janet Leigh, amazingly, gets the least to do and say, and Paul Fix (Sheriff Cody) plays the town’s sheriff, of course (he was the sheriff in The Rifleman). DeForest Kelley, who starred in multiple westerns on TV before Star Trek, and starred in 1946’s much neglected noir film Fear in the Night doesn’t have much to do, either. Amanda (Mellanie Fullerton), however, vies for kid-most-hoped-for-being-eaten-by-a-rabbit scene. Unfortunately that doesn’t happen, but she did her best, screaming all the way.
There’s the standard lab scene where a sample of saliva is (lord knows why bother?) shown through a microscope, and is determined to come from…a rabbit! At this point the music should be setting a mood, but forget that. We’ll have none of that in this movie. Instead, we keep getting closeups that, strangely enough, reveal little. We get a truck driver with a cargo of groceries cut to ribbons (offscreen), dead; a family of four horribly mutilated (off screen), then dead; a kindly lady in the general store at the local gas station as she closes up — a rabbit jumps through the window (unfortunately not offscreen) — then she’s certainly dead. In-between, more shots of rabbits running through miniature sets while the town evacuates. At least these furries huddle together in the general store after eating everything, except for the lady, in a brief scene that is unintentionally heartwarming.
The rousing finale is to electrocute the darn things using train tracks. Now, maybe I’m over thinking this, but why couldn’t they just hop over the tracks? I also took the time to Mythbusters this by asking AI about cargo-hauling train tracks, because I thought they weren’t electrified, or maybe they could be by attaching lines from a conveniently located transmission tower right by the train tracks. It depends on the tracks, but yes, some may already be set up to carry an electrical charge, even if mostly diesel locomotives run on them. In the movie the tracks aren’t that type, but juicing them up from the tower will do the trick. Now here’s what’s really a nonsensical kicker that even Mythbusters would flick a Busted at. All those people leaving the town in their cars to escape the rabbit invasion, suddenly are now lined up beyond the tracks. Another comical scene with a soldier using a bullhorn directs them to turn on their headlights to attract the attention of the rabbits — meaning to get the rabbits to head towards them. Let that percolate a little for you.
While I’m still reeling from the idea that hopping over the tracks would be pretty darn easy for giant rabbits, thus avoiding the electricity, you now have people, who were told to evacuate the town only to have them line up outside of town, trapped in their cars, and acting as guinea pigs to bring the rabbits to them. I’m glad one soldier at least told them to roll up their windows. So the only thing stopping the rabbits from crushing them in their cars is train tracks that hopefully will be stepped on by those big paws, assuming the voltage is high enough to fricassee them. Toss in some really short stock footage of machine gun nests taken from War of the Worlds and let the hopping into the frying pan commence.
The saving grace for many bad movies is cult status. To achieve that, a movie must be bad on many points of failure, but redeemable only because those points of failure are quirky or funny enough to make watching the movie still enjoyable in a glad I’m not on that train wreck sort of way. Night of the Lepus is a cult movie for that reason. Give a party-viewing, with alcohol, and you will be fine and maybe a bit more appreciative of movies that avoid such points of failure.