NIGHT OF THE LEPUS
A film review by Shane R. Burridge
Copyright 1996 Shane R. Burridge
88m.
What can the producers of this film have been thinking? With the taxonomical charts all but exhausted for likely movie monsters it appears that one of the few options left available was rabbits. For rabbits, read the six-foot killer variety. You might think that such material could only be interpreted, filmwise, as camp, but Z-feature director William F. Claxton (this is his best-known film) treats his story as soberly as the Latin denotation of the title would have it. You can call a spade a spade, but a lepus is still a bunny, and no amount of spooky lighting and blood-spattered muzzles doth a monster make. By-the-numbers plot involves Professor Roy Bennett (Stuart Whitman) and his wife Gerry (Janet Leigh) trying to rid Arizona farmland of a rabbit plague by injecting them with an experimental (what else?) virulent serum. Said serum, in the tradition of all sci-fi horror flicks, increases rabbits to giant size and sends them on the rampage ("They're getting meaner and hungrier," says Whitman, and that's while they're still pet-sized!). The expected bunny attacks ensue until our quick-thinking heroes come up with a means to destroy them. This, as it transpires, involves a subtle mix of electrocution, machine-gunning, and incineration.
To tell the truth, I feel a little sorry for the makers of this film. They'd obviously gone to some effort to have us take the rabbit threat seriously. These intentions last about as long as it takes to get to the first rabbit attack, which should coincidentally mark the first time everyone watching will laugh out loud. But apart from this scene, film is quite dull and has little that is humorous. There are a couple of moments: The sheriff exhorts the help of a drive-in audience who unquestioningly obey his absurd-sounding orders; a man driving across state ignores hitch-hiking Whitman, reminding his wife about not picking up hitchers, "especially when they're carrying guns".
Film is a failure on every level - it was even rated PG, not an auspicious start for a horror film - but it isn't too hard to imagine it being terrifying for young children, by dint of the interminable slow-motion stampeding rabbit footage (which begins to take on a surreal quality) and the mixture of monster-bunny noises (they sound alternatively like cattle, elephants, and cassettes being chewed up in a tape deck). The juxtaposition of harmless cuddly animals turning into hopping mad omnivores (not carnivores, as the film suggests) may be exactly the kind of thing to give some kids nightmares. Based on Russel Brandon's novel "The Year of the Angry Rabbit". Also with DeForest Kelley (as Elgin Vlark, a character with a name even sillier than his own). Footnote: The real-life Australian and New Zealand rabbit plagues mentioned in the film have their own solutions - in NZ you can spend one day of the April holidays participating in the Annual Easter Bunny Shoot!
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