Night of the Lepus

[IT]

Who ever thougth that giant rabbits would make scary monsters needs to have thier heads checked.A terrible movie.

[David Fullam]

Oh, to have been in on the producers meeting where this film was greenlighted. "Giant, killer Rabbits? We haven't done that before, let's roll with it!" What a classic. If you don't have the DVD then go get it!

[Fox Of Nod]

OMFG WTF!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[David Lee Ingersoll]

I loved this movie enough to do <a href="http://www.kaijuphile.com/fannest/gallery/displayimage.php?album=15&pos=5">fan art</a>. What's not to love about giant man-eating bunnies!

[TheMark]

One can only imagine what the movie "Them" could have been if the writers of this film had had a hand in it...

Dr. Medford: Then we pour cyanide gas into the rabbit hole and kill them.

Sgt. Peterson: But how can we be sure that we kill all of them?

Dr. Medford: We go into the rabbit hole and find out.

Agent Graham: Or what? The giant rabbits will twitch us to death and eat our vegetables?

[Happenstance]

Note in the pictures: these ravenous, man-eating rabbits maul people to death--and promptly abandon the body. The rabbits weren't interrupted, either; they had all night to nibble on this guy.

"The Year Of The Angry Rabbit" (the novel on which this movie was..."based") was apparently a screwball political satire in which Australia declares war on the rest of the world (satire!) by unleashing its rabbit problem upon everyone else. The "rabbit problem" is mentioned in the movie's prologue, but like Arthur Herzog's "The Swarm," the connections with the movie pretty much end right there.

Check the IMDB: "Lepus" is the screenwriter's sole writing credit. Small bloody wonder, hah?

[Bobby NYC]

Only Monty Python was able to make the idea of a kller rabbit work. This movie made me spit coffee through my nose it was soooooo dumb.

[SimonC]

That's what you find down disused mines? And I thought all the deads held up with now completely rotten wood was iffy enough.

Sounds like a good post-pub film.

[Total Nut]

I saw this on T.V. years ago while staying in a hotel. One thing I noticed that wasn't mentioned in this review was the fact that it looked like they kept using the same footage over and over again to add length to the film while saving money. I swear I saw the same shot of the bunnies running under a bridge at least three times.

[Muffin]

I hate it when people disgrace the dignity of rabbits like this. They're such beautiful animals, like miniature deer and/or horses.

[Shonkin]

Thanks for some real great laughs. I vaguely remembered the movie and was talking with a friend about it. I pulled your site up. Not only was the review great (properly funny!)... Playing those sound clips had me nearly on the floor I was so out of breath... esp. the plaintive clip of the little girl as the guys go gunning for bunny... "Mommy! I... LIKE rabbits!" Oh, man, I'm laughing again as I type. And probably the best of 'em was "Attention! Attention! Killer rabbits heading this way!" Yes, some real wasted minutes here. Hehehehehe...

[Kooshmeister]

If this actually happened, if you were actually face to face with around twenty to thirty gigantic rabbits that you knew wanted to eat you, and your comparatively ineffectual shotgun wasn't going to help much.... would you still be laughing?

I still find it amusing that no one seems to think that giant rabbits would be a credible threat to human life. A giant anything can kill a person very easily, and what people seem to forget in a world where rabbits are constantly portrayed as cute and cuddly is that they do have sharp teeth and claws. If you take any animal with claws and sharp teeth, make them fifty feet tall (or however big the rabbits were), and turn them into meat-eaters, then they're going to be real trouble.

As for the movie itself, regardless of whether or not there's any potential in the idea of killer rabbits, this doesn't change the fact the entire thing is just poorly written. What bugs me the most is how everyone seems to roll with the idea of the killer bunnies without needing much convincing. Like, for example, when they enlist the aide of all those people at the drive-in. No one questions Officer Lopez's announcement. A truly clever script could still try to present the idea of giant rabbits as being dangerous, but also acknowledge the nearly universal view of them as cute and harmless by having one or two characters who find the whole thing laughable, only to die a horrible death when they underestimate the behemoth bunnies.

Unfortunately, the script isn't clever. At all. It's treated with such dead seriousness that nothing in it can be taken at all seriously. It just has absolutely no sense of humor, and doesn't seem to think anybody, anywhere would find the subject matter anything other than laughable. So, to me, the movie's crime isn't that it's a bad idea fundamentally, but rather that they totally underestimated (or perhaps overestimated) the audience's reaction. As I said before, practically everybody everywhere finds rabbits cuddly and harmless, and if you're going to use them as movie monsters you've got to touch on this in some way or else the entire thing will fall apart, and the same holds true for any animal normally perceived as cute.

[Torgo]

[Kooshmeister]

Um... okay.

[Flangepart]

Hummm...i think thats a silent agreement with your point, Kooshmeister.
"Aw, come on. Rabbits? Killers? You gotta be kidding...AHHHH! Its got me! Arghhh!"
""I TOLD you!"

Its the deadpan acceptance of this cheeseeater that get it so riffable. The more seriously a movie takes itself, the more it sets up a riffing, when it fails.