Before Attack of the Killer Tomatoes!, and even a few scant years before Monty Python’s killer bunny that only a Holy Hand Grenade could stop, television Western director William Claxton gave us the furry monster to end all furry monsters with his adaptation of Russell Braddon’s novel, The Year of the Angry Rabbit. However, regardless of how overtly satirical the filmmakers’ agenda might have been, Night of the Lepus winds up playing it a bit too coyly for its own good, resulting in the B-movie write up that could have been.
Plagued by rabbits, rancher Cole Hillman (Rory Calhoun) is sent a zoologist, Roy Bennett (Stuart Whitman), from the nearby college. As a substitute for poison in an effort to maintain nature’s balance, Bennett devises a hormone which will hopefully disrupt the rabbits’ breeding cycle. However, when a test subject escapes before conclusive results can be made, a barrage of ravenous, giant bunnies begin appearing.
Only the deaf and blind could miss the deliberately maligned intentions the filmmakers had with Night of the Lepus. After a solid decade of giant ants, a mutated preying mantis, gargantuan spiders, elephantine scorpions, and overgrown lizards, Claxton pauses a little over two decades later to relive–by way of self-conscious parody–the behemoth mayhem. His antagonists? One-hundred-and-fifty-pound rabbits. Due credit is freely allotted the director in his deconstruction of the vestal (a-hem) image of the poor, innocent, laboratory-prone herbivore as he highlights the fact that the animal’s lightening-quick reflexes, piercing fangs, and exponential breeding ratios all house the potential for fear but, of course, wisely never attempts to soundly convince us that the package in which this formula for chaos comes in is anything less than, well, cute.
Yet, with all of this B-movie goodness in tow, the question now stands when attempting to make a self-conscious B-movie: How far is too far, thus risking permitting the premise to escape itself, verses playing it too coolly? Of course, the middle ground is the bull’s-eye here in that such a film needs to let the viewer know that what we are being given isn’t a serious effort by any stretch of the imagination but, in order to be truly enjoyable and effective, not lapse into self-referential parody. Sadly, Claxton doesn’t manage this fine-line balancing act in that–more often than not–he falls prey to being a bit too demure (a trick onto itself at times in that every other frame reminds us of the ludicrous basis for the killer plight).
Sure, we have all of the requisite “unintentional” B-jokes: an annoying child actor (Melanie Fullerton, complete with uberbrow); the overlooked substantive directions which the filmmakers could have taken the production: a metaphor for human overpopulation, an ecological cautionary tale, and various animal rights tracts; a doctor named “Leopold” amid a film whose antagonists belong to the family Leporidae; the Ray Kellogg technique of dodging a pricey special effects bill via close-ups, low camera angles, dramatic slo-mo, miniature sets (though creative implementation of cherry tomatoes in place of regular ones deserves a nod), gallons of ketchup, and people in rabbit costumes; a couple of logistic slip-ups, i.e. a flashlight left on overnight later to be found burning well after sunrise and a group of rabbits being dwarfed by a tire track as they make their way down a deserted roadway.
All of this atop some fairly unforgettable lines made possible by the absurd premise: Gerry Bennett (Janet Leigh) comforting Jackie Hillman (Chris Morrell)–the latter having narrowly escaped death after a rabbit attack–reassures him, “Calm down Jack. He’s gone. The rabbit’s gone.” After the depth of a den is tested a second time by tossing a stone into it and the stone causing no disruption down below, the ingenious deduction is made that “They’re gone. Must be holin’ up somewhere else.” And, hands down, the best dialogue bit of dialogue in recent memory, “Attention! Attention! Ladies and gentlemen, attention! There is a herd of killer rabbits headed this way [ . . . ]” Officer Lopez announces before asking the townsfolk to uniformly follow a police escort out of town. The hilarity of the situation is multiplied immediately thereafter in that no one blinks, thus implying that they find the scenario reasonable and, perhaps, that this isn’t the first time in which such a circumstance has arisen.
Yet, the last example perhaps serves as a metaphor for why Claxton’s work fails where it otherwise should have resoundingly succeeded: B-movies are to be overtly fun due to their unintentional faux pas. Instead, perhaps fearing going too far the other direction– that is, into explicit camp–the director plays it a bit too dry, leaving too much to the viewer in a film where nothing should be ambiguous because deliberate ambiguity implies craft and skill, trademarks which no B-movie filmmaker could ever rightfully lay claim.
What’s left is Night of the Lepus by director William Claxton, the B-movie parody that should have been. Interestingly, in the history of B-movie parodies, it seems as if making such a film is indeed a harder task that what it might at first appear in that John De Bello’s Attack of the Killer Tomatoes! skids headfirst into camp while Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks! is too busy for its own good, thus leaving us with the notion that only a director without skills possesses the ability to make a “seriously bad” work of cinema or, better yet, perhaps this intuitively announces that a self-mocking work of art cannot be effectively mocked without losing something in the process (how often do we see satirical takes upon satires which surmount coming across as once-removed and their narratives hollowly diluted?). In short, how hard would it have been to slide in a joke concerning rabbit pellets the size of bowling balls?
-Egregious Gurnow
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