RiffTrax

Night of the Lepus (1x172)

: 07, 2014

RABBIT! The very word strikes fear into the heart of anyone with a very strange definition of the word fear! Their very existence seems to bring terror, what with their gnawing on vegetables and hopping and...twitching their little tails… Starring in a surprisingly wide array of beloved books, cartoons, and other children’s entertainment, OK, look, rabbits aren’t scary, at all. But what if, through a combination of terrible editing and confusing camera angles, we pretended like they were very big? Hey, where are you going! So it goes in Night of the Lepus (Latin for rabbit, as characters frequently remind each other and the audience.) When rabbits overrun a farmer’s land, he turns to a local scientist for a cure rather than poison them. Thus the true message of this movie: poison rules. When the scientist’s cure backfires, the rabbits grow to enormous size and the real conflict begins: that of the special effects team vs the movie producers who evidently budgeted next to nothing for the special effects team. Using an innovative technique known as “replaying the same damn shot over and over again” the makers of Night of the Lepus manage to create the eerily convincing sensation that you are watching normal sized rabbits run towards a camera in slow motion. Occasionally they run across the screen right to left in slow motion. That Cadbury commercial where the rabbit clucks like a chicken is infinitely scarier. So is the mustache that DeForest Kelley sports in this movie. Join Mike, Kevin, and Bill for Night of the Lepus, the least scary thing involving rabbits since Bugs Bunny dressed up like a woman and seduced Elmer Fudd.