Night of the Lepus
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: DeForest Kelley, Janet Leigh, Paul Fix, Rory Calhoun, Stuart WhitmanBrand: WHITMAN,STUART
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 1.0; English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 1.0
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.85:1
Running Time: 88 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2005-10-04
Audience Rating: PG (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Studio: Warner Home Video
Movie Reviews of Night of the Lepus
Movie Review: It Could Happen, Almost
Summary: 5 Stars
This is actually one of my all time favorite movies for no other reason than that is is just fun, plain old fun.
It is well acted, though a bit dated by the clothes, vehicles, and hair. The stock footage at the beginning of the rabbit plagues in Australia is real, though the voice over was scripted for the movie.
Destruction of habitat, introduction of non-native species, and reckless killing of natural predators and prey do disrupt normal ecological cycles and create real life horrors, so that part is true to life. Scientists have indeed experimented on using natural hormones, including growth hormones from the pituitary gland to control breeding in wild animal populations. Such therapies do often create unexpected side effects like abnormal growth, visible tumors, and behavioral changes. You have this type of research to thank for most modern day roach and rat poisons. I would like to think that lab accidents never happened and no research subject ever escaped, especially one from the active group rather than the control group, but wherever humans are, human error is a possibility. So there is nothing at all impossible about the premise.
With one or two exceptions, (men in bunny suits and bunny's running down a herd of stampeding horses), the special effects are realistic in a way CGI never will be. They used real rabbits in a fairly decent mockup of the city. The sound effect when the rabbit are present is supposed to inspire nervousness, but I find it oddly soothing. Having grown up with a large hutch of bunnies, I spend a lot of time cleaning the hutch or just inside it playing with them and the rustling, chewing, snuffling sounds are pleasant, then add to that what appears to be a recording of a slowed down heartbeat and it tends to calm me right down.
The plot itself is plausible, up until the rabbits get camper trailer sized at which point gravity would cause them to collapse because their skeletal system would be inadequate to support them. In addition, one must ignore the fact that rabbits are not carnivorous, and even at that size would not be able to get enough nutrients from meat travelling through their herbivorous digestive track to keep from starving to death.... unless of course they drank the blood. (Hmm, vampiric giant killer bunny rabbits..... Nah, don't give them ideas)
The movie is good clean fun, not scary, not gorey, not funny, just familiar and comfortable and .... well.... cute. Enjoy it with an open mind. It's honestly harder to believe that ranchers, scientists, and police would work together in a crisis in this day and age than to believe that extra large rabbits went on a rampage in the midwest.
Summary of Night of the Lepus
Okay, movie fans. To all of you who like nothing better than to nuke some corn, dim the lights and settle in with cinematic mutations like gargantuan 'gators, fearsome frogs, awesome ants and monstrous moths, we quote this film: "Ladies and gentlemen, attention! There is a herd of killer rabbits headed this way!" A hormone intended to alter the breeding cycle of rabbits overrunning ranchlands instead turns them into flesh-eating, 150-pound monsters in Night of the Lepus. Stuart Whitman, Janet Leigh, Rory Calhoun and DeForest Kelley are among the intrepid humans facing the behemoth bunnies. They use guns, flames and dynamite to subtract them. But the rampaging rabbits know how to multiply. Can anything stop these hare-y scary monsters?Whoever persuaded MGM to make a movie about giant, bloodthirsty bunnies must have been some kind of mad genius. Night of the Lepus features Stuart Whitman (star of such classics as Omega Cop and Demonoid, Messenger of Death) and Janet Leigh (whose career had taken a downturn from Psycho) as a pair of scientists who say things like "I wish I knew what the effects of this serum would be--let's hope it works" as they inject test rabbits with hormones that turn them into slavering, carnivorous giant bunnies. That's the plot; the rest of the movie is scenes of giant bunnies attacking horses, giant bunnies jumping through windows to attack people, giant bunnies running in herds down the freeway...lots and lots of giant bunnies, sometimes with blood smeared across their ferocious jaws as they rear up to attack. The special effects are breathtakingly cheap; the bloody corpses are actors with red syrup splashed over them. But what makes Night of the Lepus even more astonishing is that the dvd features dubbing in French, presumably for European viewers bored with their usual diet of Truffaut and Rohmer. In fact, the movie makes more sense in French (assuming you don't actually speak the language); you can pretend it was created by an inspired Surrealist, and that Janet Leigh says things like "My bicycle has wheels of cheese" or "Beauty kisses my savage earlobe," instead of "Rabbits aren't exactly Roy's bag." Also starring Rory Calhoun (Roller Blade Warriors: Taken by Force) and DeForest Kelley (Dr. McCoy on the original Star Trek), who wears several colorful turtlenecks. A camp classic. --Bret Fetzer
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