Catalog From The Beyond: NIGHT OF THE LEPUS (1972)

In a femme fatale performance as Marion Crane, Janet Leigh is such a compelling leading lady in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, that it’s that much more shocking when you find out in bloody fashion that she, in fact, isn’t the leading lady. So, you can imagine my excitement when I realized that one of the other movies on Leigh’s résumé features killer rabbits. With Easter Sunday coming up, I figured what better way to celebrate Jesus coming back from the dead as a giant bunny (I’m assuming that’s what happened) than by checking out a flick about massive rabbits terrorizing the Southwest?

I’m a sucker for “nature’s revenge” movies, and the sillier the premise, the better. George McCowan’s Frogs, for example, is a nutty exploitation masterpiece that layers insightful social commentary in between sheets of bonkers set pieces where various amphibians and reptiles attack the local aristocracy. Could Night of the Lepus strike a similar chord? Of course, there was only one way to find out.

Director William F. Claxton must have known that “killer rabbits” would be a tough premise to sell to an audience, so he kicks off the proceedings by alluding to a rabbit infestation that’s actually plagued Australia for a couple hundred years. The movie only gives us a few nuggets to set the scene, but I was interested to see if any of this was true. As it turns out, Australia is indeed rotten with rabbits. When colonists from Europe introduced them to Australia in the 18th century as part of an effort to make it feel more like home, they didn’t realize the cotton-tailed hell they were unleashing on this poor little continent. By the mid-20th century, there were approximately 10 billion rabbits on the island. To put that in context, there are only about 7.5 billion humans living on the entire planet. Needless to say, this caused a problem for Australian residents, who have used any number of methods to control the population, from poison, to rabbit hunts, to more poison.

After implying that rabbits could very well be the end of us all, Claxton begins the movie proper by introducing Cole Hillman (Rory Calhoun), a rancher whose land has its own rabbit problem. Not wanting to resort to environmentally damaging methods like pesticides, he consults with his friend from the local university, Elgin Clark (DeForest Kelley beaming back down from the Enterprise). Clark connects Hillman with Roy and Gerry Bennett (Stuart Whitman and Janet Leigh), a husband/wife scientist duo who have more eco-friendly methods for controlling the population. You know, mild remedies like messing with the rabbits’ DNA and introducing them to various diseases. Shockingly, these methods have the unintended side effect of increasing their size to that of a large dog. Sure, they attempted to put safety controls in place to keep these mutations from spreading into the wild, but unfortunately their precocious daughter, Amanda (Melanie Fullerton), swaps out one of the rabbits that she hoped to keep. Naturally, it escapes into the ranch to multiply (as rabbits do) and unleash an epically horrific catastrophe throughout the town.

Or, at least it would be horrific if these rabbits were not THE MOST ADORABLE DAMN THINGS I’VE EVER SEEN! I’ve covered killer animal movies before with The Killer Shrews, but in that case the effects were created by dressing up some dogs. In Lepus, however, all of the effects are done with footage of actual rabbits, often just intercutting close-ups of bunnies with a splash of blood or rabid foam around their mouths. Sometimes, though, they use miniature models of settings throughout the town and let the bunnies hop through what essentially amounts to a diorama of a small southwestern town.

That being said, these adorable guys are not screwing around. When they start tearing into the townsfolk, the blood flows freely. This being the early ’70s, that blood is the bright, crimson, paint-your-barn variety that just pops off the screen. Truckers are dismembered, whole families are left in shreds at their picnic site, and one unfortunate fellow named Chet survives an initial attack only to get butchered in another one a few minutes later. Poor Chet. I’m actually surprised this movie snuck by the MPAA with a PG rating.

One of the most interesting things about Night of the Lepus is that it doesn’t seem to be going for laughs. There’s really no intentional humor and nary a one-liner to be found in the film. As Roy and Gerry, Whitman and Leigh are very earnest in their approach, with Leigh in particular doing a commendable job in scenes when she’s forced to fend off these fluffy fiends with road flares. Rory Calhoun’s funniest line is his first, as he greets his son by telling him he had to shoot his horse after it broke its leg. So, not too many chuckles to be found there, either. And I waited for a good hour before I realized that DeForest Kelley wasn’t going to turn his head to the camera and say, “Damn it Jim, I’m a professor, not an exterminator!” It seems as though everyone involved knew that the premise alone was going to carry the “silly factor,” so they all played it straight and let the cute bunnies do the heavy lifting.

If I have one gripe about this movie, it’s that even at 83 minutes, there are a few stretches that drag once the novelty of the premise wears off. There are, after all, only so many ways you can show rabbits “stampeding” through a model set. I don’t know if this says more about me or the movie, but as my mind started to wander, I found myself pondering things like, I’m going to be very sad if I never get the opportunity to ride a giant bunny before I die, and, I really hope they didn’t stick little squibs on those rabbits. With that in mind, I’d definitely recommend you give this a peek if you want to watch some floppy-eared mayhem. Although it may be best to find someone to watch it with in case you, like me, get the odd rabbit-induced question hopping into your brain.