Night of the Lepus
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DVD Cover Information Actor: DeForest Kelley, Janet Leigh, Paul Fix, Rory Calhoun, Stuart Whitman Director: William F. Claxton Brand: Warner Brothers DVD: Region Code 1 Audio: English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 1.0; English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); French (Subtitled) Format: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD-Video, 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 |
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Movie Reviews of Night of the Lepus
Movie Review: Bad, but so very, very good.
Summary: 2 Stars
[note: review written long before the DVD was available.]
Night of the Lepus (William F. Claxton, 1972)
Night of the Lepus was Bill Claxton's first big-screen movie in eight years, and it turned out to be his last. This is no surprise for anyone who's actually seen Night of the Lepus, which is one of the most monstrously bad, unintentionally funny movies ever made. To call it a box-office bomb would be understating the case by a mile. And yet, it has a certain charm to it that is inarguable.
Screenwriters Don Holliday, who'd never written a screenplay that made it to the big screen before (and never did again), and Gene Kearney, who wrote some of Night Gallery's best shaggy-dog jokes (but also its single most boring episode, the melodramatic "Silent Snow, Secret Snow"), took Russell Braddon's fantastic satire, The Year of the Angry Rabbit, and stripped it of all its humor, as well as transplanting it (for, one assumes, budgetary purposes) to the American southwest-- Ajo, AZ, to be precise. (Ajo is in the southwestern part of the state, roughly halfway between Tucson and Yuma.) Kearney, perhaps, should have realized that he's a better comedy writer than drama writer.
Your basic plot is this: a town sheriff, a University director, an environmentalist, and various hangers-on have to defeat a plague of mutant giant killer rabbits. Yes, folks, mutant giant killer rabbits. Now, that alone should be enough to sell you on the "so bad it's good" aspect of this film. But in case it's not, let me point out that the Sheriff is played by Paul Fix (The Sons of Katie Elder, Zabriskie Point, The Rifleman, etc.), the University director is played by DeForest Kelley (an in-demand character actor before Star Trek, Kelley would get no work outside the Star Trek franchise again until 1998), and the environmentalist and his wife are played by Stuart Whitman (Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines, Eaten Alive, The Treasure Seekers, etc.) and Janet Leigh (Psycho, The Fog, etc.). Also along for the ride are Rory Calhoun (Motel Hell, Hell Comes to Frogtown, etc.), Chuck Hayward (Parts: The Clonus Horror, Airport '77, etc.), I. Stanford Jolley (who had almost 250 films to his credit, but made only one more after this), etc. All of whom, no matter what their level of talent in anything else, absolutely stink here. As do the special effects, the sets, and just about everything else about this movie.
One special note needs to be made of the gratuitous use of repeated scenes and the incredibly bad editing work involved with them. For example, early on in the film, you'll be looking at the giant killer mutant bunny wondering what that odd red thing is by its foot. It makes sense to think it's a bloody head, until you see the same scene later on, in a wider shot, and realize it's an apple. Towards the end of the film, a scene of the rabbits storming down the road is seen, and it's obviously another piece of the same stretch of road from earlier in the film (the same house is on the corner), yet the rabbits are supposedly well out of town by this point.
It's little stupidities like this that turn Night of the Lepus from the kind of overly-crappy idiocy-fest that is, say, The Day After Tomorrow and make it into a classic of bad cinema. Would be very much worth adding to your video collection, were it at all available on video or DVD. * ½