Night of the Lepus
Directed by William F. Claxton
Written by Don Holliday and Gene R. Kearney from the novel “The Year of the Angry Rabbit” by Russell Braddon
1972/USA
IMDb page
First viewing/Amazon Prime rental
Officer Lopez: Attention! Attention! Ladies and gentlemen, attention! There is a herd of killer rabbits headed this way and we desperately need your help!
This movie ticks every box that makes up bad movie gold.
The movie begins with shots of rabbit plagues in Australia and New Zealand with seemingly millions of bunnies eating everything in site. We then move to Arizona, where a coyote extermination has led to a plague of rabbits. Rancher Cole Hillman is reluctant to use poison fearing the effects on the environment. So he calls in zoologist Roy Bennett (Stuart Whitman) for a more friendly solution. Roy immediately begins genetically modifying domestic rabbits in hopes of producing less fertile animal, because how could that possibly go wrong?
Wife Gerry (Janet Leigh) and daughter Amanda tag along. Amanda is an extremely annoying little kid with a love for bunnies. Of course. she is allowed to go exploring and generally messing with things in the lab. Amanda thinks it is funny to swap cages and rabbits. That is how she gets a modified rabbit instead of a control rabbit when she asks for a pet. Of course, she lets it escape.
That rabbit reproduces like a bunny and its progeny are highly fertile, carnivorous (possibly blood-sucking) creatures weighing 100 to 150 pounds. (The size is repeatedly compared to the size of a wolf.) The creatures travel in huge herds like stampeding cattle (complete with thundering paws), devouring cows, horses and humans in their way. And now we leave it up to the lunkhead that created the problem to solve it.
There is no way to make a bunny rabbit look threatening no matter how much ketchup you smear on its quivering nose or how small the miniatures you put next to it. This fact puts a ludicrous veneer on every single frame of the picture and makes already stupid dialogue that much more funny. It could have been trimmed a bit but still is going on my non-existent Top-Ten Most Entertaining Bad Movies of All Time list. I wonder if the little cottontails that visit our back yard every day would like it?
Bonus: Janet Leigh gets to work out her famous scream a lot. Such a come-down.
Unused theme song – “The Hunter Gets Captured by the Game” written by Smokey Robinson
Oh, every word of this and more. How desperate did they have to be to find a new giant monster threat to settle on rabbits? Were voles or sparrows unavailable?
It’s just so gloriously stupid.
I like your quip about the viewer actually being dumber after watching this. I can’t think of anything worse than bunnies – favorite food of carnivores everywhere. I’m so glad I watched it.
I love Night of the Lepus.
A friend of mine said that if giant rabbits attacked you, you would laugh. Even as they were biting your head off and stomping you to a pulp, you would laugh until you died. When I watch Night if the Lepus, I imagine every victim laughing until he or she is dead.
Hard to think of a creature more harmless unless it is a killer tomato.