Fucking children...
Night of the Lepus primarily follows Cole Hillman (Rory Calhoun), a rancher looking to get rid of the massive amount of rabbits on his land and married scientists Roy and Gerry Bennett (Stuart Whitman and Janet Leigh), the two tasked with coming up with a solution other than poisoning to get rid of said rabbits.
The two scientist attempt to inject the rabbits with a serum that will cause birth defects (and thus reduce the rabbit population that way) but instead it makes the rabbits grow larger and more aggressive. They then must destroy the rabbits to prevent any from making it into the wild, but wouldn't you know: their daughter Amanda (Melanie Fullerton) switches one of the injected rabbits with one of the control rabbits then convinces her parents to let her take one of the control rabbits home.
You see where this is going...
Soon enough, giant rabbits are terrorizing the countryside (thanks Amanda) and everyone must put their heads together to figure out a way to stop them.
It's a fairly standard eco-horror plot (though this dips a toe into SciFi a bit more than others of the same type, like Frogs), propped up by having well-known actors like Leigh, Calhoun, and Whitman as stars. It was part of the 'Animals Run Amok' trend in the early 70s and is most notable for how the fact the 'monster' of the film was rabbits was hidden in both the posters and trailers.
The film utterly fails to make the rabbits scary. Director William F. Claxton mostly had regular rabbits running on miniature sets and used slow motion to make them seem larger (this does not work at all) and then had people in rabbit suits for scenes where a rabbit needed to be up close 'attacking' someone (this looked even worse). I appreciate the effort (1972 was not a good time to try to make a film with this plotline and have it even approach realistic special effects), but it was ultimately a failure.
The film does gain some charm from (despite?) the terrible effects. Contemporaneous critics called the acting wooden, but I thought it was fine for the most part. No one elevated the material in any way, but no one was terrible either. The score is fairly nondescript, but after consecutive days of movies with jarring sound cues, that is almost welcome. The movie is serviceable, which might be its biggest sin.
See, this movie has the makings of a true cult classic - ridiculous premise, terrible effects, sincere acting - but it never really rises up (or down, to be more honest) in such a way that it becomes campy. Again, it is serviceable. Other than the complete failure of the effects, it mostly succeeds in telling its story. Maybe it would have been better had it not had established actors? It never quite hits the level of truly terrible, which weirdly would had helped it.
But back to that child: Every death in this movie can be traced back to Amanda, and unless I missed something somewhere (very possible) she never even fesses up to switching out the test rabbit. And this isn't a small death toll movie - an entire village is basically overtaken/eaten by the rabbits, and the National Guard has to be called in to handle the problem. This is bullshit, and there should've been some sort of consequence!
Would I recommend this movie? No, but mostly because of how forgettable it is, which is something a giant rabbit movie should never be. But it isn't bad, and there are worse movies to watch.
5 out of 10
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