Jack calm down… he’s gone. The rabbit’s gone…
MGM’s silly revenge of nature/mundane monster movie piggy backs on the Drive-In appeal of AIP productions like Frogs and precedes the gloriously awful trick photography of The Food of the Gods, to appeal to a dispensable fast film crowd. But William Claxton‘s Night of the Lepus isn’t as completely mindless as people tend to give it discredit for.
Friendly animal scientist Stuart Whitman and his wife Janet Leigh are sent to Arizona to check out an explosion of bunny activity at Rory Calhoun‘s rabbit ravaged farm. They dismiss using poison and instead toy with hormones and mysterious growth serums in their attempt to prevent disrupting “the balance”. Needless to say it doesn’t work. Which is a good thing for Whitman, Leigh and DeForest Kelley, because it keeps them in work for 90 minutes.
Those expecting out and out kitsch horror are likely to be somewhat disappointed with this excellently named film – it opens, to all intents and purposes, as a straightforward western – albeit one filled with murderous mammals. Veteran director Claxton cannot help but gaze lovingly over his Stetson wearing populace, the Tucson backdrop and an evident fondness for horses…
Yes, the acting is stilted and yes, the choice of rabbits as the source of the films Science Fiction Horror doesn’t quite do it in the way Hitchcock’s birds did, but Night of the Lepus is still a pretty well polished film. The initial use of close up photography, quick cuts and a stark palette that introduces the angry rabbits is decent enough and as stylized as it unquestionably is, the ketchup blood effects on mutilated families and other such bunny fodder are pleasingly horrible. Night of the Lepus is a pretty well paced film too – besides some awkward science exposition at the start, the film sheds its fat and gets on with things promptly from here on in.
Claxton’s mistake is to throw caution to the wind and go after explicitly describing his monsters as the film rolls on. Ditching the western milieu familiar to him, he treads too far into uncharted cinematic territory and gets lost in a baffling set of special effects that take in kids in bunny costumes and domestic rabbits roaming through miniature set design, bringing the film’s credibility crashing to the earth. That said, there is something undeniably appealing about killer rabbit point of view shots in cinema, and the Night of the Lepus audience are treated to the brief viewpoint of a window diving, throat slashing, Lepus. For kicks.
Whitman manages to finally work out that good old fashioned, manly violence is the best policy here and an electric barricade tactic, coupled with a surprisingly violent turkey shoot in the final battle, has something of a Rourke’s Drift feel to it. Meaning Claxton gets to play with pop guns one last time and restore his old western logic to the resolution of his film. Non taxing enough for lazy Easter Sunday afternoon viewing and just about palatable enough after a bellyful of chocolate eggs, Night of the Lepus raises a couple of cheap, brief laughs before burrowing its way back into the compost of this kind of dodgy eco-horror until next Easter. There is, after all, only so much slow motion-rabbit running through town, one can take in a year…
