Night of the Lepus (1972)

Directed by William F. Claxton. Starring Stuart Whitman, Rory Calhoun, Janet Leigh, DeForest Kelley, Paul Fix, Chuck Hayward, Henry Wills, Chris Morrell, William Elliott. [PG]

Locals are concerned when Arizona ranch land gets overrun by giant mutant rabbits on the warpath. Let me repeat that: giant mutant rabbits. Audiences in 1972 weren’t really that easy to terrify, were they? (No wonder The Exorcist traumatized millions.)Dreadful scripting (beyond the inane premise) and wooden acting from all parties—what the heck is Janet Leigh doing here?—makes the “down time” scenes an endurance test, and when the fuzzy-wuzzies come to attack…holy moly. You ever seen bunnies running in slow motion amid miniature models? You wanna see it about twenty times? You want to see filmmakers try to convince us that a bunny yawning and stretching is actually a bunny roaring and preparing to strike? You want to guess in which shots are the rabbits just puppets or guys in suits? Not even that fun to laugh at because it becomes so repetitive and dull; the fluffy-to-scary ratio is about 20:1, so knock yourself out if you dare. DeForest Kelley plays a college president here, and a few years later, William Shatner would play a vet dealing with his own deadly animal outbreak (tarantulas) in rural Arizona in Kingdom of the Spiders—this is what happens when you don’t give these guys Star Trek shows/movies to do!

15/100