When I think of ridiculous horror movies, this one has been my go-to example for a long time. I mean come on, killer rabbits? Call em by whatever name you want, I couldn't imagine how they could possibly make fuzzy little bunnies scary. And even more confusing, how could they get psychos Janet Leigh involved?
Arizona rancher Cole Hillman (Rory Calhoun), dealing with massive rabbit overpopulation on his land, calls on a local college president, Elgin Clark (DeForest Kelley), to help him. In order to humanely resolve the matter, Elgin brings in researchers Roy (Stuart Whitman) and Gerry Bennett (Janet Leigh), who inject the rabbits with chemicals. However, they fail to anticipate the consequences of their actions. A breed of giant mutant rabbits emerges and starts killing every human in sight.
But before we get to all that fun stuff, this movie decides to set the tone by opening with various rabbit murders, and a guy shooting a horse in the head. It's a bizarre and jarring way to open this movie, and now it's as good a time as any dimension if rabbit violence isn't your thing you should probably skip this movie.
This movie is chock full of rabbits squealing in agony, and it's one of the most upsetting noises that I've ever had the displeasure of hearing. Not only that but there's some serious manhandling of these rabbits to the point where they're literally being tossed into the garbage bins. I'm no animal rights activist, but I can't help being comfortable after seeing such a disregard for any kind of life. Anyways now that I got that out of my system, let's talk about this wild ass movie.
For a lot of it's run time, this movie isn't really trying to be a horror movie. Like a lot of movies like this, this movie basically just follows these people when they're everyday normal life, I'm in 20 minutes and we get the first real horror bit of this movie, and it is exactly as goofy as I hoped it would be.
Every single shot of the "giant rabbits" is painfully obvious how they filmed it. Smear a little bit of red schmutz on a rabbit's nose, film a bunch of close-ups of its mouth and teeth, film them running on a miniature set, then in post add the noise of a growling grizzly bear every time they show up. And as for the giant rabbits "victims", just rip open their clothing in different spots and smear fake blood all over them. No need to do any special effects work whatsoever to make it look like they were gnawed by rabbits, just have the characters mention that they look like they've been bit by rabbits even though there's not a single scratch on anyone. With a danger so totally unbelievable, there's really no tension or horror to be had in this movie.
And when the giant rabbits aren't killing people, you're stuck with long boring scenes of characters talking about doing stuff instead of actually doing anything. It's a problem a lot of early movies like this tend to have, and when there's no giant rabbits on screen this movie can get downright boring. All of the acting is quite well done, but the script really doesn't have much to it.
When it comes to making rabbits scary, I think I'll stick with Donnie Darko and David Lynch.
5/10
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