Like Christmas movies, Easter movies have only so many iconic touchstones to wave to declare their allegiance to the holiday, but it seems as if Christmas gets more mileage out of its storehouse than Easter does out of its two major devotional images: the resurrection of the Christian Messiah, and cute fluffy bunnies. A glance at the TV listings shows that movies that feature crucifixions clearly predominate on the weekend schedule, even as they tend to shut out movies made by Martin Scorsese or Robert Downey, Sr. But a few minutes of most Biblical movies, especially when compared to the work of Chuck Jones, may leave you wondering if the rabbit movies don't really have the inside track. Night of the Lepus may be the perfect Easter movie just because it makes an effort to meet both camps halfway: it depicts the human race buying itself a second chance at life by crucifying (okay, electrocuting) several acres' worth of giant, rampaging bunny rabbits. Inexplicably, TV programmers have yet to seize on it as a holiday perennial, and the chances that this might be the year that changes got even smaller when Turner Classic Movies ran it last weekend as part of its "TCM Underground" series, thus indicating that the network not only has a real counter-instinct for innovative holiday programming, but that somebody over there detects an unsuspected outlaw-cinema vibe in Stuart Whitman.
Whitman plays a do-gooder scientist who, trying to keep rancher Rory Calhoun from spreading poison to rid his fields of rabbits, creates a serum that he hopes will disrupt the bunnies' breeding patterns. Instead, it turns them into jumbo-size monster bunnies that leave burrow holes the size of craters and maul a guy named Jud for implictly mocking their lifestyle by picking the lettuce out of his sandwich. (After Whitman's wife and partner, Janet Leigh, chases Jud's attacker off with a shotgun, she wipes what appears to be ketchup off his face and tries to quiet his whimpering by assuring him, "It's okay, Jud, it's okay. The rabbit's gone.") Night of the Lepus, which also stars Star Trek's DeForrest Kelley in a notably unflattering mustache, is not a good movie — snippets of it appear on a TV set in Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers, and the footage is much stranger and more disturbing when seen for bare seconds at a time, out of context. But it does have its instructive side, especially in the sense that it can be very educational to see how not to do something. To view a sequence in which shots of rabbits hopping through the desert are intercut with scenes of cattle stampeding, and then to realize that you're supposed to get the idea that the cattle are stampeding because giant rabbits are coming their way, is to grasp with special force that there is much more to the editor's art than one is likely to master from a correspondence course and a lot of blind self-confidence. The film is also overly devoted to what I've always thought of as "The Six Million Dollar Man fallacy", a common delusion among editors and production people in the 1970s, probably inspired by desperation, that anything can be made more awesome by running it in slow motion. After the big mass-electrocution scene, the film winds up with a lingering shot of a couple of bunnies eyeballing the camera and spectacularly failing to seem ominous. Most of the movie's attempted thrills were achieved through trick photography, if one can use that term even when the trick doesn't take, though a large stuffed bunny seems to be employed in Jud's big scene, and there is one classic shot, of the kind that could not be fully appreciated until the invention of the freeze-frame button, of a guy in a rabbit suit getting whacked in the face. Whatever he got paid, it wasn't enough. (Of course, if the producers had had enough money to do the movie right, they would have paid somebody to forcibly shave DeForrest Kelley.) It could be that the advent of CGI could now make a truly thrilling Night of the Lepus remake a reality. Are you listening, Richard Kelly?