Burl reviews Night of the Lepus! (1972)

With a hippity-hop it’s Burl, here to review a tale of bunnikin terror! Ha ha, of course I’m talking about Night of the Lepus: aside from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and maybe that Arch Hall epic The Nasty Rabbit, I can think of no other killer bunnies on film! And perhaps - I only say perhaps - that’s for the best! If you’ve seen Night of the Lepus, you’ll probably have formed your own opinion on that point!

Aside from having the cottontail horror angle all to itself, Night of the Lepus fits into a number of other microgenres of which I’m fond! I’ve always enjoyed what I call Southwestern Horror: genre pictures set in the wide desert expanses of that part of North America! I’m talking about The Car and Nightwing and The Devil’s Rain, or even lesser stuff like The Ghost Dance and Track of the Moonbeast! At the same time, with its cast of heroic grayhairs, Night of the Lepus, like Bog, comes off at times like a nursing home stage production put up to showcase the talents of elderly performers!

Thanks to some sort of serum, the specific nature of which the script doesn’t even try to explain, a test rabbit released into the wild sires a band of bunnies as big as moocows! Ha ha, and these guys are hungry and aggressive, and apparently nocturnal, which I didn’t realize rabbits were! Anyway, a loosely-knit group made up of scientist Stuart Whitman from The Deadly Intruder, his wife and helpmate Janet Leigh from Psycho and The Fog, rancher Rory Calhoun from Motel Hell, and concerned moustacheman and Star Trekker DeForest Kelly (quite able here to discern DeForest from DeTrees, ha ha), work on rabbit-ridding strategies while dodging the slow-motion hops and tempera paint-smeared incisors of the creatures!

Perhaps because the oversized hares are so inherently goofy, there is plenty of blood used in the killing scenes, and they do ruthless things like mutilate entire families! Ha ha, mostly it’s just the same bright red blood smears seen in pictures like Grizzly, but, also like that picture, there are some severed limbs as well, with one victim sectioned like a butcher’s wall chart! No, a rabbit’s foot does not mean good luck to these unfortunates, ha ha! The fuzzy bunnies also rampage through a produce warehouse, which you’d think would satisfy them, but they’re eventually attracted into a trap by the headlights of some good people who were attending a drive-in screening of Every Little Crook and Nanny, and as a consequence the beasts run afoul of an electrified train track and are fricasseed!

As in Tentacles, we mostly get shots of normal-sized rabbits filmed to look large, at least allegedly! They hop through some nice miniature sets, and there are also a few quick shots of people in rabbit suits, which are worth pausing to get a better look at! If you’re a rabbit lover you may want to steer clear of this picture however, as it does include plenty of documentary footage of actual rabbits being rounded up and terrorized! Otherwise it’s a pretty good time at the movies, with lots of fun badness on offer and a few pretty shots of the barren Southwest! Anyway, it’s unique! I give Night of the Lepus one and a half panicky farmhands!