Night of the Lepus (1972) Review

WEEK 1: THREE CRAZY CREATURE FEATURES 

Night of the Lepus (1972) Review

“Ladies and gentlemen, attention! There is a herd of killer rabbits headed this way...” More precisely: they are giant, mutated rabbits with a taste for human flesh. Armed with the knowledge of this premise, anyone going into Night of the Lepus expecting high-calibre horror entertainment is doomed. If you expect a ridiculous piece of campy amusement, you’re going to get precisely what you want.

The plot is not worth divulging extensively, so I’ll give a brief synopsis. It starts with a news report about a growing rabbit problem in Australia, and footage of real rabbits launching themselves at fences is shown, before cutting to a remote American town with the same sort of problem. A husband and wife research duo are experimenting on rabbits, and inject one with a hormone. They unwittingly give the bunny to their daughter as a pet, but it escapes, and soon the town is infested with giant killer rabbits. Terror ensues, and the townspeople must band together to destroy them.

So why the title Night of the Lepus? Lepus is the Latin name for a genus of hare, though to my knowledge, domestic rabbits were used in the movie, not hares. The original title was simply Rabbits, which makes much more sense, but the studio didn’t want the marketing for this movie to make sense, apparently; they wanted to hide the fact that it was about killer rabbits, instead of embrace it, the way many fans that discovered it years after its release did, helping it garner a cult status. With a premise this preposterous, you can’t help but laugh, and ironically, the movie takes itself totally serious, unlike the sci-fi novel which it’s based on, titled The Year of the Angry Rabbit.

The two main characters, who I’ll refer to as Eyebrows (guy has super bushy eyebrows) and Psycho Girl (played by Janet Leigh of Psycho fame), are pretty standard, but the stand-out actors are the child actors. They are two of the worst child actors I have ever seen; their line delivery is so cringe-worthy, I actually felt bad for them. You can tell they were trying their best, but when your best doesn’t even come close to being acceptable, just stop. Eyebrows and Psycho Girl have a surprisingly large vocabulary for such a stupid movie, and I don’t know if anyone else has ever picked up on this, but it seemed rather peculiar. They use numerous big words (I don’t have any examples, unfortunately), but that’s mostly in the first half of the movie. By the second half, they just quit trying.

There are lots of rabbits right from the beginning, but none of them are killer to start with. There is tons of

obvious stock footage used, and many re-used shots of the rabbits, probably because it was difficult to get them to stay in front of a camera looking menacing with saliva dripping from their open jaws for very long. There’s a scene where the kids go looking for their friend Captain Billy (an awesome name, I must say) at a mine, and this is when one of the killer rabbits makes its first appearance. The method of portraying the looming lepus is primarily showing a regular domestic rabbit on a miniature set. The secondary method is a man in a rabbit costume. How do I know it was a man in a rabbit costume? Well, it wasn’t hard to figure out. For the shots of the rabbit packs, a human breathing sound effect was added, which is kind of odd, but even odder yet, is it sort of works to make it creepy.

I’m surprised by how much gore they were allowed to get away with. There’s a gruesome corpse that’s shown very suddenly, and it’s almost shocking. The arm and leg are completely severed and there’s blood all over, but unfortunately, the actor underneath all the special effects wasn’t told to hold his breath for the shot, so he’s seen breathing, and it completely ruins the illusion. Still, it’s pretty bloody for a PG movie, especially one from the early seventies. Most of the deaths, however, are more implied than shown.

It’s fun seeing the characters find evidence of the rabbits in the first half of the movie—giant footprints, bloody corpses, huge burrows, but no piles of turds, strangely enough—and by the half way point, there’s already been a lot of action, though nothing too special.  At one point the rabbits trap some people in a house, and the people hide in the basement while the rabbits invade the home (think Signs but with giant rabbits). As the movie progresses, the miniatures keep improving and becoming more ambitious. By the end, an entire area of land and several buildings are invaded by the rabbits. Although by conventional movie standards, I guess the miniatures aren’t supposed to look like miniatures, so does that mean they failed? I don’t think so. Fake though they may appear, it’s still clear a lot of work went into them, and they serve their purpose. But no, the miniature sets don’t look very realistic.

The rabbits go away for the middle portion of the film, and it makes the wait for the climax a little tedious. The plan to kill them all is probably the best solution to a problem in a movie since sending the giant turtle Gamera to mars in a space craft (Check out my Gamera review from last year for more than that). The townspeople electrify the train tracks and herd the rabbits onto them. The rabbits charge down the streets toward their doom, and I noticed in one shot, a pile of grain randomly rains down on the miniature street. Clearly someone was throwing grain onto the set from off-screen, but I guess they thought it would blend in with the destruction the rabbits were causing and no one would notice. The ending is definitely the most absurd—and thoroughly amusing—part of the whole movie.

In the end, Night of the Lepus is pretty much what one should expect from such an asinine premise. It’s not quite as crazy as may have been possible with a larger budget, but the filmmakers did what they could, and it makes for a fun time to watch with some friends and have a laugh.

That wraps up this trilogy of Crazy Creature Features. The first full week of Clayton’s Creepy Cinema begins tomorrow; tune in for a full seven days of slithering serpents!