"Attention! Attention! Ladies and gentlemen, attention! There is a herd of killer rabbits headed this way and we desperately need your help!"
-Officer Lopez
Another legendary bad movie. This is the story of how
Doctor McCoy (OK, OK, DeForest Kelley, but in a
really orange turtleneck) helped Stuart Whitman, Janet Leigh and Rory Calhoun save the world from a herd of
Giant Killer Bunny Rabbits.
No, really. The idea is that experimental hormone injections intended to stop the rabbits breeding, as an environmentally friendly form of pest control, actually causes them to become
Giant Killer Bunny Rabbits. One dosed-up bunny escapes into the wild and starts breeding with the local population. Suddenly there are hordes of
Giant Killer Bunny Rabbits running around, and it's all very ironic. Or something.
In the interests of total fairness, wild rabbits can be surprisingly vicious when pushed to it (ask anyone who's ever read
Watership Down). But trying to cast them as menacing,
growling monsters with a lust for human flesh is...proof that when this idea was greenlit the studio execs had just emerged from a decade spent under a rock, being whacked with a stupid stick. The clearly miniscule SFX budget doesn't help.
Eventually, Our Heroes drive the 'shambling hordes' of
Giant Killer Bunny Rabbits over some electrified train tracks, and the viewer is left to imagine them spending the rest of their lives trying to convince people of how brave they were, saving the world from Thumper.
Interestingly, this movie was famously
not featured on
Mystery Science Theater 3000, despite the show having mentioned it a couple of times, indicating that its creators were aware of it. One can only assume they could not resolve the licensing issues (with a much more prominent studio than is usual among their targets)... or else they thought it would be just
too easy. The Agony Booth, however,
has no such difficulty
.
Examples:
- Adaptation Decay: The source novel - no, seriously - The Year of the Angry Rabbit, by Russell Braddon, is actually an Australian political satire.
- Adaptation Distillation: Albeit chances are you've never heard of the novel.
- B Movie: It's hard to believe a major studio (MGM) paid for this movie, let alone ponied up for a decent cast... but they did.
- Chroma Key: Very badly done.
- Covers Always Lie: Or at least, misdirect.
- Cult Classic
- Disaster Movie: With Giant Killer Bunny Rabbits
- Everythings Better With Bunnies: Subverted. They kill.
- Film Of The Book
- Guilty Pleasure
- Hey, It's That Guy: DeForest Kelley.
- And Janet Leigh. You know, from Psycho.
- Hair Raising Hare. Well. It's what they were gunning for.
- Hollywood Science: Let's see what this totally unknown serum does to rabbits!
- Giant Killer Bunny Rabbits
- Karma Houdini: No one ever calls the the little girl on switching the bunnies.
- Kill It With Fire
- Narm: And how!
- Nightmare Fuel: Not at all what the movie intended, but seeing the bunnies get killed (especially the flamethrower scene) can be very disturbing for an animal lover.
- Nightmare Retardant: Given the whole 'took cute widdle nose-twitching pet bunnies and filmed them in extreme close-up' attitude to SFX on display here, it's really hard to take these Giant Killer Bunny Rabbits seriously even were you inclined to try. You're more likely to be scared of the Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog.
- Our Monsters Are Different: Because they're Giant Killer Bunny Rabbits
- People In Rubber Suits: The Giant Killer Bunny Rabbits actually required to attack? Those are guys in bunny suits.
- The Professor
- Reasonable Authority Figure: Played straight to Fridge Logic levels. Really, if you told a local sheriff that there's Giant Killer Bunny Rabbits heading towards town, they will more likely ask if you're drunk or if this is a joke first. The authorities in the movie don't question this as much they would.
- Shout Out: If you look carefully, you can see a few seconds of this movie on the TV when Neo walks into the Oracle's apartment.
- Bits of footage also appear in the movie Natural Born Killers, mixed in with the other odd bits that spot the film here and there.
- Slow Motion: Used to make bunnies on miniature sets look big and ponderous. This fails spectacularly.
- Snark Bait: If you can't understand why, you're having trouble with the definition of 'snark' to begin with.
- So Bad Its Good: Really, you just can't hate this movie, simply because of its charming stupidity.
- Special Effects Failure: Giant Killer Bunny Rabbits are shown stomp...er, hopping around obviously fake miniature sets.
- Not to mention the scene with the rabbit attacking a guy in his bedroom, where it switches between a guy in a rabbit suit and a taxidermy rabbit.
