Night of the Lepus (1972)

THIS REVIEW IS ALSO POSTED AT THE BLOG I CONTRIBUTE TO YEAR-ROUND.

Head to HorrorMovieAWeek.co.uk to see what my freind Lisa thinks about this film, and the rest of the 52 movies we review each and every year.

WARNING:
Although this movie has been tagged as "Recommended" I am not claiming it is a "good" film. It is not. 

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A cattle farmer in the American South West calls in experimental biologists to help rid him of his rabbit-infestation, a rabbit injected win an experimental serum is inadvertently released into the wild, the infestation of rabbits rapidly becomes an infestation of giant, killer rabbits.
It's up to the farmer, and the scientists who created the monsters, to find a way to stop them before they reach a nearby town and destroy it.

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Based on the novel "The Year of the Angry Rabbit", and starring Janet Leigh, DeForrest Kelley, and a bunch of other people you'll recognise if you watch a few 60's / early 70's movies, the most striking thing about Night of the Lepus is how po-faced the whole thing is!

You'd think a movie about giant killer rabbits had to be a spoof, but you'd be wrong; the filmmakers have honestly made every attempt to make this a genuinely good / frightening monster movie... and that's exactly why it works!

Even within the movie, no-one seems to pause and go "Rabbits?.. Really?"; it's just taken at face value that this is a thing now... at one point a police car pulls into a drive in movie theater and evacuates the place, telling the patrons that "there's a herd of killer rabbits headed this way" (not even mentioning that they are giant killer rabbits) and everyone just calmly starts their engines, and do as the cop says!

So-Bad-It's-Good movies that were intentionally made as So-Bad-It's-Good movies rarely work; the true masterpieces of bad cinema are almost always serious films that were either incompetently made, or just so fucking ludicrous that they had no hope in hell of being taken seriously... This falls into the latter camp

While I'm sure a bunny the size of a car, lolloping towards you with blood on its mouth would be terrifying in real life, on film its just too goofy for words!

That a farmer would have access to experimental biologist to solve a simple rabbit infestation, that those biologists would be using an "experimental serum" sent to them by the department of health, that the department of health would somehow come to possess a serum that they have literally no idea what it does, that said serum would not only cause a rabbit to grow to several feet tall in a matter of hours, and that the gigantism would be contagious; these things alone make the movie laughable beyond words, that fact that a giant rabbit isn't remotely scary is just the icing on the cake!

The rabbits seem to change size a lot, depending on what else is in shot with them, and they are very rarely seen in the same shot as a human... I can understand why, it's because CGI wasn't invented, and stop motion / guy in a suit would have looked awful; but at the same time the way they have worked around that (Actors looking up and screaming, cut to: shot of a rabbit in extreme close-up) often makes it look like someone has edited bunnies into another movie for shits and giggles.

The actors do a remarkably good job; Leigh especially is a trooper, saying the line "It's okay now, he's gone... the rabbit is gone" to a hysterical adult without even the faintest hint of a smile.

Effects wise, we're talking red paint for blood, but I must admit that some of the miniature sets were astounding (even if they couldn't just pick a scale and stick to it).

I love this movie... I'm sure that the film-makers would be disgusted to hear the ways in which I love this movie (although surely, they've heard it enough times by now), but I loved it.

Big Fat "Recommended"