Night Of the Lepus (1972) Bunnies! Blood-dripping, fang bearing, carnivorous......bunny rabbits!!!
Anyone who never heard of this movie probably thinks we opened with that sentence for the sole purpose of getting everyone's attention......
Well.....it worked, didn't it? Which is what the executives at MGM must have thought when they greenlighted this sorry cheeseball to begin with.....
Not even Notorious B.I.G. (Bert I. Gordon, the maestro of low-budget monster movies) would've thought to photographically enlarge bunnies and film them in slow motion as they loped across miniature replicas of desert roads. (B.I.G. much preferred creatures that looked like credible threats, wuch enlarged, like grasshoppers, spiders, rats, ants, wasps and the Amazing Colossal Man, bald guy in diaper.)
No hare-raising for B.I.G......he had to draw the line somewhere.......
Not the brave execs at MGM, though. Throwing caution to the wind, along with a few bucks for the bunnies, they hoped to get on the ecological horror bandwagon of nature-gone-awry screamers.
We're running the risk of making this movie sound like it's some outrageously entertaining guilty pleasure, so let's stop right here to say something......
Like MGM's other 1970's sci-fi atrocity "The Ice Pirates", (see our post from 4 days ago), 'Night Of The Lepus' is still nothing but unwatchable junk on every level, unfit for human consumption.
But we can't fault the cast......they're a solid professional bunch, including Rory Calhoun as a rancher afflicted with a bunny plague and Stuart Whitman and Janet Leigh as the husband-wife team of eco-minded scientists trying to alleviate the onslaught with neutering serum. ('Star Trek's DeForest Kelly shows up briefly in a worthless supporting role...)
Wouldn't you know it, Whitman and Leigh's whiny little daughter switches around the test bunnies in their lab. Somehow, in the movie's Never Neverland grasp of science, this results in a matter of days, in hordes of bunnies the size of pickup trucks galloping ever so slowly through the Arizona countryside, gobbling up livestock and eviscerating the populace.
The special effects deployed for these rabbit rampages, as anyone except an MGM executive could have predicted, came out looking unintentionally hilarious......filled with desperate attempts to make all those slo-mo cuties appear threatening with close ups of their lettuce-chomping front teeth smeared with ketchup. Yikes....eek!
What really struck us as odd (other than the ballooned-up bunnies)........Whitman and Leigh's characters seem to suffer no guilt, no remorse, no second thoughts or a moment's pause that their negligence and incompetence as scientists led to all this carnage, disaster and destruction.
Come to think of it, that makes them no different than the MGM suited-lizards who okay'd this movie for production in the first place. Just like the bunny-eaten victims, things didn't go well for them. Zero stars (0)......Halloween viewing only if your Halloween party features plenty of six packs and/or tequila shots beforehand.........
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