It’s Wabbit Season

Here come the B’s…

Hollywood was desperate to bring people back into the theater starting in the fifties. There was also that pesky problem of once-guaranteed revenue streams disappearing, so belts had to be tightened in so many respects. MGM was no different than any other studio, but given what they had been for audiences for almost fifty years, they seemed to have more to lose. Their 1972 B-flick, Night of the Lepus seems ironically like both a cry for help and a teeny slice of MGM ingenuity.

The film opens with a rather ominous news report about rabbits that are reproducing so fast that the humans they live with have to flee, and we see footage of people casually and calmly jogging across fields swatting at rabbits. Meanwhile, the rabbits twitch their noses at each other and hop around like cute little furry locusts. When they’re not throwing themselves at wire fencing, that is.

Yep, the rabbits are a problem. The movie takes us to Arizona, where a rancher named Cole Hillman (Rory Calhoun) has such a bad rabbit infestation that his cattle are being elbowed out of grazing land. So he calls Elgin Clark (DeForest Kelly) president of a local university, who knows people well-versed in pest control, and Elgin calls Roy and Gerry Bennett (Stuart Whitman and Janet Leigh), a husband and wife research team who are in from the East to study bats and find out a way to kill bug infestations without poisoning anything else.

That’s fine with Cole, who doesn’t want to use poisons because he thinks his cattle would get poisoned as well. So Roy comes up with an alternative solution: Hormones. Interrupt the rabbits’ breeding cycle and introduce a disease that will only affect the rabbits. Et voilá.

What could possibly go wrong, right? Heh. Everything.

It all starts when daughter Amanda (Melanie Fullerton) switches out one of the control group rabbits for Romeo, one of the regular rabbits, and long story short, Romeo escapes and breeds with other rabbits, forming an army of freakishly large bunnies with a taste for rending their victims limb from limb. And no, the hormones don’t mess up their reproductive abilities one bit.

Faced with an ever-climbing body count, not to mention the grotesque mutilation of those bodies, Roy, Elgin, and Cole put their heads together with local sheriff Cody (Paul Fix) to take the rabbits down. Seeing as shooting the rabbits is only a temporary and feeble solution, the fix will have to be big. Really big.

Fortunately, the authorities have matters well in hand and Roy can go rescue Gerry and Amanda, who were on their way to safety at a lodge and got stuck in some soft sand. The rabbits find them, of course.

OK. Straight up, Night of the Lepus is at once clever and cringe-y, and calling a rabbit by its Latin name doesn’t make it any scarier. It just doesn’t, especially with a movie that was as cheaply done as this one. It looks mostly like a TV movie, for one thing. The characters are rather bland and unremarkable. The dialogue is just as pedestrian, which is a shame because, as any Star Trek fan or even a casual viewer can attest, DeForest Kelley had a way with dry humor. Does he get to tap into that in Lepus? Heck, no.

None of that matters, though, because it’s all about the rabbits, which were filmed upwards from below to make them look large and menacing. MGM even scaled sets so that the rabbits would look monstrous when, for instance, they break into someone’s kitchen and started smashing things, or stampede over a bridge like frustrated cattle.

What we don’t see are composite shots of humans standing next to the rabbits so we can see how big they’re supposed to be. Not even when Gerry is standing outside the family camper with a terrified Amanda watching through a window do we get to see the murderous rabbits in the same frame with her. Nope. All we get are little cuts of rabbit eyes, rabbit teeth, rabbit paws, horrified human facial expressions, and more hopping.

I laughed more than I probably should have. It’s hard not to when the supposed menace lopes across a miniaturized bridge with their cute little cottontails in the air, or when they make noises like turkeys and breathe like Darth Vader.

MGM went all out with the publicity on the film, though, marketing Lepus to teenagers, college students, and counter-cultural types, sending posters and other promotional materials to college campuses, record stores, and stores that sold psychedelic clothing. They even tried to get radio stations to play a five minute clip of the sounds the Lepuses make in the movie, but it’s unclear if there were many takers.

Not surprisingly, the press had a field day with Night of the Lepus. Roger Greenspun of the New York Times said this: “Several friends have asked how you can make a rabbit seem scary, and I must confess that “Night of the Lepus” in no way answers their question. It doesn’t even reasonably try.”

No, it sure doesn’t. Not even TCM could find something good to say about the movie, and it has a zero percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes.  However, Time included Lepus in its list of Top Ten Killer-Animal Movies, where it shares space with Jaws and The Birds, but even Time described the movie as a “massively entertaining train wreck.”

So yeah, how the mighty have fallen. Odds are good MGM released it and regretted everything.

For more favorite stars in B-movies, please see Brian at Films From Beyond the Time Barrier. Thanks for hosting this, Brian–so glad you brought it back! Thanks for reading, all, and I hope to see you tomorrow for another post…

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Night of the Lepus is available to own on DVD and Blu-ray from Amazon.

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