(1972) ***1/2
Giant bunnies! The monster this time is a huge horde of wolf-sized rabbits. To make this movie, they made a ton of miniature sets and filmed rabbits running around on them, then played them back in slow motion. Bunnies running around on the farm! Bunnies busting into your house and trashing your kitchen! Bunnies chilling out in the general store! It goes on and on; this movie really delivers on its promise. The sound effect for a bunny stampede is a low, bubbly groove that repeats endlessly, adding an eerie touch. I think if you sped it up, you'd get that whirring noise from Piranha.
It's funny to see how hard they try to make rabbits scary. The movie opens with a special news cast about rabbit plagues at home and abroad. Later our wuffly, disheveled scientist talks up their bite: "The bite of the lepus -- that's Latin for rabbit -- can be quite powerful." (Like how he stuck that Latin word in there? Scientists do stuff like that; they're better people than us.) The trailer is a looping routine of "WHAT caused all this devastation? WHAT is the secret behind this terror?" because if they answered the question, nobody would come see it. Except me. Because if it isn't already clear, I totally loved this movie.
It was interesting to view the main charactes in this one compared to Snowbeast. In 1972, the heroes are gnarled-looking guys in their forties and fifties, in 1978 they're trying to keep the roughness but also make them sexy, which comes off kind of weird now. One of the leads in Lepus is good old DeForest Kelly, along with a couple of veteran cowboy actors and Janet Leigh sporting a frightening mane of hair.
Roy the Scientist Who Cares wants to help out Cole the rancher, who also cares. Trying to find a solution to a crisis involving regular-sized rabbits, but without resorting to poison, Roy tests out a hormone or some such on a bunch of lab rabbits. (The science in this is pretty shaky, partially due to the smart move of zipping through it fast.) However, all of Roy's ecological correctness can't stop his daughter from switching an injected rabbit with a control rabbit, or stop Cole's son from releasing said rabbit in a fit of anti-rabbit pique. Thus by the mechanations of two bad child actors, several people are mauled to death by giant rabbits. As usual.
Despite the high levels of goofiness in this one, it's fairly well put together. The acting is decent, the plot moves quick enough if you're not easily bored by giant bunny footage, and it's reasonably bloody. Get together with some friends who like to yell stuff at the screen and check it out.
4 comments:
If this movie seems weirdly familiar but you don't think you've ever actually seen it, you might be thinking of the brief Night of the Lepus cameo that occurs in the first Matrix movie. It's playing on the television in the Oracle's living room.
There is no spoon.
SPOON!
"Get together with some friends who like to yell stuff at the screen and check it out."
That should be a whole new genre of film, "movies to yell at with friends".
I love it.
Except when the person yelling at the screen yells "If I turn around, you can't see me!" That was one of the nonsensical things that an annoying guy yelled during last year's Friday the 13th 3D debacle with JPX.
Shoe horn!
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