• Directed by William F. Claxton
• Written by Don Holliday and Gene Kearney, based on the novel The Year of the Angry Rabbit by Russell Braddon
• Starring
  • Stuart Whitman
  • Janet Leigh
  • Rory Calhoun
  • DeForest Kelley
  • Paul Fix

I really feel for the poor guys in the MGM marketing department in the early ’70s. A movie called Rabbits landed on their desks, and they just stared at it while feeling the follicles on the tops of their heads give up and wither. Because how the hell were they going to market a creature feature about giant rabbits? And not hideous mutant rabbits, either; fuzzy domestic rabbits embiggened by the venerable technique of placing them on miniature sets. Not a camp laugh riot, either — this movie plays it as seriously as any enlarged creature flick, from Them! (1954) on down.

Eventually, the only marketing strategy they could come with was this: Change the name to Night of the Lepus, put no rabbits on the vague poster, mention rabbits nowhere in the ad copy, and hope to hell that they could make back their money in the drive-ins before bad word-of-mouth killed them.

Aside from the inclusion of rabbits (which is a pretty big “aside from”), it’s an entry in the “large animal menace” as standard as standard can be, right down to the credentialed B-movie cast. Unfortunately, it hews very closely to a template which reached its zenith in the ’50s, and doesn’t add much to update it aside from ill-kempt hair and funky polyester fabrics. I hate to say it, but the enlarged man-killing rabbits are just about the only memorable part of this movie.

“Dammit, Cole, I’m a college president, not a doctor!”

It starts with news footage of the Australian rabbit overpopulation of 1954, along with a news announcer blathering on about the “balance of nature.” Funny, he seems a lot more concerned about whether man’s attempts to control rabbit populations will throw off that balance than the fact that it’s was man who unbalanced things to begin with by importing rabbits to Australia. This opening sequence seems like it was tacked on as an afterthought to try to predispose audiences to believe that, no, seriously, rabbits can be a menace. Any such effect is negated, though, by running the opening credits over a freeze-frame of rabbits around their burrow. Not ominous rabbits, but fuzzy-wuzzy bunny rabbits. It’s a good thing it’s a freeze-frame, or we’d be captivated by their twitching noses.

So now the real movie. Arizona rancher Cole Hillman (Rory Calhoun) is up to his neck in rabbits eating his rangeland bare, and to top it off, the horse he’s riding “steps” in a rabbit hole and “breaks its leg.” (I put those in quotations because it’s pretty obviously that the horse didn’t step in anything, and the broken leg is perfectly fine.) Cole goes to see his buddy, President Elgin Clark (DeForest Kelley) at “the college” — there’s only one — to see if the eggheads have some way to help. He’s a little cautious; the last guy the college sent to help control the coyote overpopulation was so successful that, in the absence of coyotes, the rabbits took over. Clark knows just the people to help him…

…And we are thus introduced to Roy and Gerry Bennett (Stuart Whitman and Janet Leigh), whose titles at the college are never given, but they’re pretty heavily into animals and ecology and whatnot. We first meet them catching bats at a cave, after which Roy records the bats’ squeaks of fear. See, he plans to play the squeaks back via loudspeakers to persuade bat migrations to migrate into other areas where mosquitos are a problem. It’s a kinder, gentler kind of manipulation!

“Anyone seen a redshirt that could go first?”

Unfortunately, Roy and Gerry have taken all of their worst genetic leavings and wrapped them up in the person of their daughter, Amanda (Melanie Fullerton). Amanda is whiny and she is stupid, and the Bennetts go nowhere without her. How stupid is she? Well, as Roy and Gerry extract the last of the bats out of the huge net they’ve erected over a cave entrance and place it in the wire cage with the other bats, Amanda asks, “What are you doing that for, Daddy?” Yes, it’s a question tailor-made for expository convenience, but it also means that Amanda has allowed herself to be dragged away from suburbia and hung around while her parents hung a huge net and then stirred up the bats enough to fly into it, and it’s only at the end of their specimen collecting that the questions stirs in her dull brain of what they’re doing, anyway. I wouldn’t harp on this, but this isn’t an isolated instance. In fact, the plot would die a-bornin’ if it weren’t for her dullwitted ways.

Anyway. Elgin asks them to look into Hillman’s problem, because bug control and rabbit control are all the same if you stand back far enough. Roy and Gerry (and Amanda) visit Hillman’s ranch, where the grownups talk about ecological balance and suchlike, while Amanda finds a kindred spirit in Jackie (Chris Morrell), Hillman’s son. (These scenes? They’re painful. Any scene comprising nothing but two child actors is less than the sum of its parts.) Roy’s possible solution lies in hormones; if he can disrupt the rabbits’ breeding cycle, their numbers should drop. So with a dozen rabbits in tow for test subjects, they go back to the lab on campus.

Boy, for researchers who specialize in bugs, they sure have a lot of rabbit-sized cages in the their lab, huh? Unfortunately, they also still have Amanda. Seriously, could we afford a babysitter here? Because it’s been at least a few weeks since they brought back their test subjects and all of their best attempts are proving negative, and Amanda’s just getting around to asking, “Mama, what’s a control group?” Running out of ideas, Roy injects a rabbit with an isolated compound which an associate says is the basis for birth defects. Then, because that last experimental subject was “her favorite,” Amanda switches its cage for a control rabbit. Then she asks is she can keep it for a pet. And then, when the Bennetts drive back to Hillman’s ranch for some more rabbit “volunteers,” Amanda takes along her pet, and Jackie knocks it out of her hands because he’s just so mad at all the rabbits. Congratulations, Amanda; because of your stupidity (not to mention your lack of respect for experimental rigor), a mutant element has been introduced into the gene pool, and everything that happens from here on out is your fault.

“Shh!  Be vewwy vewwy quiet — we’re hunting wabbits.”

Of course, no one ever calls her on it, or even figures out why the rabbits are mutating, and she’s pretty much guaranteed to survive the movie because she’s blonde, female, and preadolescent; but if there’s any justice to be had, twenty years later she’s gonna be spending a lot of money on therapists to overcome the guilt.

I almost hesitate to describe the rest of the movie. Like I said, this kind of B-movie is a mechanical contrivance; drop in the animal and setting, wind it up, and let it run until the closing credits. Hillman and the Bennetts discover some tracks by a watering hole (days later? Weeks?) that Hillman can’t identify. Meanwhile, bit players start being slaughtered on lonely roads at night, carved up in a way that the medical examiner has never seen before — one could almost say “chewed.” And if you know me, you know I am desperately, desperately resisting the urge to quote from that one scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975).

Even when our heroes realize that it’s giant rabbits doing the killing, there’s no moment of you’ve-got-to-be-kidding-me awareness. None of the characters think that it’s ridiculous that the countryside is being terrorized by bear-sized rabbits (Roy actually calls them “wolf-sized,” but that connotes a leanness that these rabbits don’t exhibit). They’re not even lean, feral jackrabbits; they’re cute, fuzzy domesticated rabbits. Hell, they’re bunnies.

How, you ask, is this all realized? 98% of the time, it’s by having a couple dozen rabbits hop in slow-motion through a miniature set so that they look about five feet high at the shoulder. In shots where there’s supposed to be some interaction between giant rabbits and normal-sized people, we get an awful lot of tight, quick edits, with the occasional rabbit-fur mitten being waved at the victim (and in at least one instance, a man in a rabbit suit that induces giggles after 0.1 seconds of audience exposure).

Know what would make this movie absolutely perfect? 3-D.

Oh, and there’s blood. To make the rabbits ominous, their cute wittle muzzles are often smeared with either foamy slime or the blood of their most recent victim. Of course, even giant rabbits don’t eat meat, but I guess whatever makes them grow also makes them hella mean; even though they can’t eat meat, they go out of their way to attack and chew up whoever they can find, like a cotton-tailed blend of slashers and zombies.

And it’s all played entirely straight. All of it. This is not a campy parody; it’s instead the single biggest miscalculation in the giant animal genre. (Could no one suggest any other mammals which were more dangerous-seeming? Rats, weasels… even prairie dogs!) It doesn’t matter how many people they kill or how much ominous electronica fills the soundtrack every time they approach, bunny rabbits are still bunny rabbits.

Perhaps in an effort not to underline the unbelievability of the rabbits as cruel harbingers of death, our casts also makes sure that their performances are unbelievable. No one can argue that our stars and co-stars aren’t consummate professionals from their resumes, but Stuart Whitman and Janet Leigh seem determined to have us believe that the deplorable thespian abilities of Melanie Fullerton as Amanda come as her familial legacy. Every scene where Whitman and Leigh are together — and there are lots — seem like the first read-through of the script, and the only emotion Whitman and Leigh convey is pride at remembering their lines. I love DeForest Kelley as if he were my grandfather, but when his is the best acting on display, there’s something seriously wrong.

Rabbits like them some truck stop cuisine.

Night of the Lepus is now available on DVD as a “camp classic,” with jokey rabbit-themed puns all through the copy on the back of the DVD case. But you just have to imagine what the original audiences thought when confronted by a straight, non-winking creature feature which tried to present rabbits as giant killing machines. I an guarantee you that they were not thinking, “This is exactly what I paid to see.”

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 10
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 88
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 2
  • DeForest Kelley, obviously
  • Paul Fix (Sheriff Cody) played “Dr. Mark Piper” in the second pilot of the classic series, “Where No Man Has Gone Before” (that’s right, he was Dr. McCoy’s predecessor!)