Watched as a mini-Collab with Ziglet_mir and MushiMinion in celebration of Chinese/Lunar New Year, because 2023 is the year of the rabbit in Chinese culture. However I must note that for Vietnamese people this is actually the year of the cat, with our Vietnamese friends making the very reasonable point that cats are useful in ways that bunnies are not. So whatever the zodiac animal, let me wish everyone a great 2023 (and it shouldn't be hard to top the last few years).

Derided instantly upon release and ever since as the least scary horror film of all time, Night of the Lepus absolutely lives up to that reputation. Things are not looking good even from the title, which uses a scientific/Latin term because "Night of the Rabbits" would, of course, sound even more risible. Except that even that's a mistake as the correct name for the rabbit family is "Leporidae", while "Lepus" applies only to hares, yet this story features your garden variety bunnies. If I had to guess it would be either because no one properly looked this up or they might have assumed almost no one going to see a drive-in movie about giant killer rabbits would be able to confidently pronounce the word "Leporidae". The film was based on the 1964 satirical science fiction novel, The Year of the Angry Rabbit which is apparently about "giant mutant rabbits running amok in Australia while the Prime Minister uses a new superweapon to dominate the planet." Man, I gotta read that! Needless to say nothing like this happens in the film. After a newsreel prologue talking about the rabbit plague in Australia we pick up events in the American south west, and the rest of the story plays out completely straight.

So there's some scientists called in to deal with the pestilential bun buns. They try and do good, their annoying kid fucks everything up, there's some tedious biology lectures that still don't quite explain how the rabbits become giant mutated killers seemingly over a day or so. And then the rest of the film is the cutest murderous stampede you've ever seen. The original scream queen herself Janet Leigh is here, and apparently she only took on the role because it was filming nearby where she lived which meant less time away from her family. There's also a moustachioed DeForest Kelley in his final non-Star Trek film appearance, but you don't watch a movie like this for the humans. Indeed you could skip the first 30 minutes and miss nothing, then just crack open a few beers and enjoy the silliness. No matter how hard the filmmakers try, there's just no way to make rabbits look fearsome. I appreciated the miniature sets they shot them on, the macro lenses, the slow motion, the tomato sauce smeared on their cute little noses to look like blood, but absolutely none of it worked, and it was hilarious. I wasn't that hot on the eco-horror of Phase IV (1974), but at least an army of ants is scarier than a berry (that's the collective noun, I promise!) of rabbits.