The “nature bites back” subgenre
enjoyed its brief but wonderful moment in the movie spotlight during
the brave new scientific wonderland
of the Fifties, as audiences thrilled to the mutating potential of the
mighty atom. Ants, scorpions and spiders were the usual culprits, grown
to enormous size, though the growing environmental movement in the early
Seventies also inspired a few spins on the subject.
One such movie, Frogs (see: Sam Elliott), suffered for choosing a rather
docile animal protagonist – though amphibians did at least offer
some level of slimy discomfort for the viewing public. Released the same
year, Night of the Lepus doesn’t even have that going for it -
the terrifying menaces at the centre of this monster story are…bunny
rabbits.
Giant flesh-eating bunny rabbits, no less.
Facing off against the furry apocalypse is Janet Leigh - wife of Tony
Curtis and mother of Jamie Lee Curtis - who went from working with the
likes of Orson Welles in Touch of Evil, Kirk Douglas in The Vikings,
Alfred Hitchcock in Psycho and Frank Sinatra in The Manchurian Candidate
to battling bloodthirsty bunnies in just ten sad years.
Leigh stars as Gerry Bennett, one half of a husband and wife science
team investigating non-lethal ways of dealing with pest control. Along
with
hubby Roy she’s called in to help a local farmer whose land is
being overrun by rabbits – the Latin name for which is “lepus” we’re
helpfully informed.
Their rather foolhardy solution to the problem is to inject a test rabbit
with an experimental hormone – “I wish I knew what the effect
of this serum will be” mutters Roy, as he injects the thing anyway
- but their scallywag moppet of a daughter swaps the infected bunny for
a normal one and takes him home as a pet. To the surprise of nobody,
it gets loose and before you can say “What’s up, doc?” enormous
and carnivorous rabbits are tearing a bloody swathe across the American
heartland.
Unlike most movies of this type – and surprisingly, given the completely
stupid nature of the threat – it doesn’t take the Army long
to get their act together. Some off-screen boffins run some tests, the
results come back as “Giant Rabbit Attack” and the stage
is set for one of the strangest climaxes imaginable, as hundreds of stuffed
toy bunnies are electrocuted in slow motion, their charred, furry corpses
piled high on a desert railroad. “Survival of the fittest” muses
Roy as the air fills with the aromatic scent of roast rabbit, though
it’s doubtful that Darwin thought to include the electrocution
of hormonally super-charged bunnies in his theory of natural selection.
Janet Leigh grits her teeth throughout the proceedings, clearly happier
with the bunny-free dramatic scenes where she can pretend she’s
in a respectable thriller rather than, say, the scene that requires her
to defend a camper van from growling rabbits by throwing road flares
at them like a demented Elmer Fudd. Be vewwy qwiet, she’s hunting
wabbits!
The bunnies themselves are simply stock footage of normal rabbits, slowed
down to give them at least some element of ominous threat. Guttural animal
snarls are played over the top of their squeaks, but there really is
no escaping the fact that, no matter how much fake blood they paint on
their adorable little faces, these are cute ickle cuddly wuddly bunny
wabbits.
Need to know: The cast also includes DeForrest Kelly, aka Dr “Bones” McCoy
from the original Star Trek TV series, and Rory Calhoun, star of dozens
of classic westerns such as The Treasure of Pancho Villa. The working
title for the film was simply Rabbits, until some bright spark in the
marketing department realised they’d get more people through the
door if audiences didn’t know they were going to see a killer rabbit
movie until it was too late. Amazingly, Night of the Lepus was based
on an Australian novel with an even more stupid title – Year of
the Angry Rabbit.
Availability: Night of the Lepus can be found on DVD in the US.
