SEASON 3, EPISODE 17, NIGHT OF THE LEPUS - A Rabbit Rampage For Easter!

Happy Easter from The Rad Revival House! To commemorate such a joyous occasion, we will tackle the awesomely bad 1970s camp horror classic, NIGHT OF THE LEPUS!

Our beloved host, Professor Cesare Augusto, tackles this review solo for a change. Here, he provides a testament to the schlocky, so-bad-it’s-good trash masterpiece NIGHT OF THE LEPUS, which he first discovered on TNT’s “Monster-Vision” horror campaign from the 1990s.

Determined to rid his ranch of a growing rabbit pestilence, Arizona farmer Cole Hillman (Rory Calhoun) enlists the aid of local scientist Roy Bennett (Stuart Whitman), Roy’s wife Gerry (Janet Leigh), and college researcher Elgin Clark (DeForest Kelley) to reduce this cute but cuddly invasion. Bennett seeks a more humane approach to curbing the rabbit pestilence through serums rather than poisons (which some of the other ranchers would readily use). However, a mixup during the research instead causes the experimental bunnies to grow in massive size! Soon, the rabbit population mutates, causing the once cute critters to enlarge to the size of wolves as they begin rampaging all over the Arizona desert and devouring everything from livestock to human beings in their path!

NIGHT OF THE LEPUS suffers from a very obvious low budget, where the film crew is forced to use miniature sets and stunt performers dressed in bunny costumes during the film’s so-called “human mauling” scenes. But as a fan of these “nature run amok” B-pictures, Professor Cesare defends the film’s crude style, stating the production utilized everything they can to make the giant rabbits actually look menacing and destructive. Cesare also credits the film for being so boldly cheesy and goofy that it actually gives the movie its ludicrous charm. NIGHT OF THE LEPUS does not pretend to be high-art; on the contrary, the film’s cast and crew plays it entirely straight for the sake of storytelling, that they fully embrace its cheesy premise to create pure entertainment. We at the RRH recommend would-be filmmakers with designs towards campy shlock fun to watch NIGHT OF THE LEPUS as homework on how to successfully make gold out of trash, and make a truly killing as a result!