Night Of The Lepus (DVD)

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Here's a trivia question for you: Which came first, the man-eating rabbit in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" or the man-eating rabbits in "Night of the Lepus"?

OK, you're too smart for me. Yes, it was "Night of the Lepus," 1972, predating "The Holy Grail" by three full years! Too bad "Night of the Lepus" wasn't done tongue in cheek; it might have been pretty funny.

As it is, the movie is done completely straight, as though no one making the film thought the idea of hordes of ravenous six-foot rabbits was at all humorous. Now, understand, a good spoof should be done straight. But we also have to have a few clues that what we're seeing is not meant to be taken seriously. In "Night of the Lepus" we get no such clues. This is a dead-on earnest production from beginning to end. Which, I suppose, qualifies it for one of those "so-bad-it's-good" categories that allow us to laugh at how awful it is. This angle works for about two minutes of the movie's eighty-eight minute running time.

"Lepus," as you all know, is Latin for "hare." Or at least you do now that this dreadful horror movie so ingrains us with the idea. The one thing the word's got in its favor is that people can have fun playing with it. That's what Warner Bros. do on the keep case, claiming "Your hare will stand on end!" Cute. Unfortunately, that line is better than anything in the film. And what else could WB do but go along with a joke and admit up front that the film's a dud?

The movie begins in mock-documentary style, with an announcer telling us how much a nuisance rabbits have become in parts of the world, like Australia, for instance, and sections of the Western United States. He goes on to say, "Rabbits, that seem so cuddly as pets, can become a menace." Yep, they can serve as the underlying idea for a bad horror flick.

Based on the novel "The Year of the Angry Rabbit" by Russell Braddon, the movie starts with a silly premise and flies ever higher with it. The setting is somewhere out West on a cattle ranch, where the owner, Cole Hillman (Rory Calhoun), finds himself knee-deep in rabbits. They're eating the grass on his range and tripping up his cattle with their burrows. They are too numerous to shoot and a detriment that apparently only science can solve. The scientists in question are Roy Bennett (Stuart Whitman) and his wife Gerry (Janet Leigh), who at this moment are in the area studying insects and bats and such.

When told of the rabbit problem, Bennett suggests getting rid of the furry little critters by feeding them hormones that will interrupt their breeding cycle. Within a few years, the rabbit population will dwindle down to nothing. Sounds good, but Bennett has to perfect the right hormone, and before he does so one of the rabbits from his control group gets away from the laboratory and infects the other rabbits in the region. A side effect of the hormone is that it makes the animals grow ten times their normal size and turns them ferocious.

Before we know it, there are hordes of gigantic, albeit cuddlesome, six-foot rabbits roaming the plains and feeding on the local populace. Moreover, the rabbits breed like, well, like rabbits, and there appears no end to what harm they can inflict on Mankind. One of the worst things is having to listen to the sound they make, sort of a combination of horses, cattle, and big cats all rolled into one.

The movie's leads are hardly unknowns: Stuart Whitman from "Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines"; Janet Leigh, yes that Janet Leigh, from "Psycho"; and Rory Calhoun from about two hundred Westerns of the forties and fifties. Yet they're given nothing to say or do, and, thus, they behave accordingly. All of the actors seem stiff and uninvolved, just reading their lines and heading out the door as fast as possible for the payroll office. Not even DeForest Kelley as a college president can save the day, looking just as perplexed here as he always did on "Star Trek."