The MONTY PYTHON Rabbit Was Scarier Than This

[bloodyrosemccoy]

Okay, so, I knew Night of the Lepus was a notoriously bad B-movie, but I expected the bad effects to be something along the lines of quick and heavily edited and shadowed shots of lame puppets made to look something like the horrible nightmare-induced dust bunny from Ursula Vernon's Irrational fears.

I was not expecting a bunch of shots of fluffy doe-eyed domestic bunnies with daubs of red paint on their mouths gnawing on models.

Come on, man! This is the 70s! Can I even get a process shot of human and supersized bunny? The 50s were all over sizing up tarantulas, iguanas, crickets, etc. and sticking humans on the other side of the screen! The Monty Python rabbit was scarier than this. This is just sad. Adorable, but sad. They're probably not even going to eat this family of vacationers, god dammit.

Hell, give me the small friendly dogs wearing carpet trimmings that were supposed to pass for The Killer Shrews over this mess.

There is one saving grace, though: the extremely groovy 70s-edition DeForest Kelley, replete with sideburns and sleazy mustache. You rock that hideous fashion, Bones.

(Spookier things even as I watch this: Outside my window, there are emocat noises, suggesting that either the elusive Emocat is doing another poetry slam, or our own cat Charlie is singing her mouse-killin' song. Either way, it's a pretty eerie sound.)

Comments

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Man, I'm so used to the scale problems with monster movies like this that I figured the inconsistent size of the monster rabbits was a given. Although I did enjoy the scene where ... damn, I didn't bother remembering names, uh, Greasy Hairpile Dude #1? ... peers into the destroyed general store, and they cut to an "interior" shot of a bunch of elephant-sized rabbits sitting inside, and then they cut back to a shot of the front of the store where you can clearly see through the blown-out doors and windows that there are NO RABBITS ANYWHERE IN THERE.

And for sure, those were not happy bunnies in most scenes. I mostly just wound up feeling bad for them.

I have seen scary rabbits that worked reasonably well ... but they are usually distorted to look scary. Just plain ol' rabbits are only really scary in a Watership Down sense--to other rabbits.

(I need a bunny icon!)