NIGHT OF THE LEPUS (1972)

 

(Director: William F. Claxton. Screenplay by Don Holliday and Gene Kearney, loosely based on Russell Braddon's satirical 1965 novel, The Year of the Angry Rabbit.)

Review

Storyline: A small town in the American Southwest is attacked by mutated rabbits. 

LEPUS is a silly, boring giant-monsters film. Oh, sure, for two seconds the closeup and shadow shots of the bunnies to make them seem huge are amusing, but otherwise this is a straight-faced snoozefest. Actress Janet Leigh (PSYCHO, 1960) who took the role of Gerry Bennett, said she was in the film because it was close to her house, enabling her to spend more time with her family. She also, post-film release, said it’s a film she tries to forget. Probably a good thing she did not allow her daughters, Kelly and Jamie Lee Curtis (HALLOWEEN, 1978), to act in it because she did not want her daughters to see and act in horror films.

Stuart Whitman (EATEN ALIVE, 1976), Rory Calhoun (MOTEL HELL, 1980), DeForest Kelley (in his final non-STAR TREK role) and Paul Fix (the first, unaired episode of STAR TREK: THE ORIGINAL SERIES, 1966) also have big roles in LEPUS. Like Leigh, they do the best they can with their thankless roles. Worth watching if you're willing to fast-forward through the film, inebriated, high and/or in a silly mood.

Deep(er) filmic dive

According to IMDb, LEPUS was originally titled NIGHT OF THE LEPERS, a NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968) rip-off, but after a MGM executive spilled wine on its script, causing him to mistake LEPERS for LEPUS, he made a joke about a murderous rabbit flick to his daughter. She was greatly amused by the notion, and the script was radically reworked, resulting in LEPUS.

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From Michael Gingold’s article “That Time Jamie Lee Curtis Could Have Faced Killer Bunnies” (Fangoria magazine, Vol. 2 #20, July 2023, p. 87):

 

“The credited source material is The Year of the Angry Rabbit. . . published in 1965. When [20^th Century Fox] studio head Richard D. Zanuck lost his job, the project went with him, and was ultimately sold to MGM. The location was changed from Australia to America, among many other altercations: as [film director Michael] Ritchie told Michael Walsh in Vancouver’s The Province: ‘All the politics, all the satire, all the humor was taken out, all the characters changed and what was left was the worst movie ever made.’” . . .

 

“One of the [screen]writers was Gene R. Kearny, who scripted Curtis Harrington’s 1967 psycho-sexual thriller Games; the other is billed as Don Holliday, who appears to have no other screenwriting credits, though that pseudonym was used by several authors on sexy paperbacks throughout the 1960s, including the The Man from C.A.M.P. gay spy-adventure series.” . . .

 

“The LEPUS ensemble also included 350 rabbits playing both the normal rabbits and the enlarged mutations, rampaging through miniature sets (on which food pellets were used to get them to literally chew the scenery). Production had to be halted when ‘Mildred,’ one of the star bunnies became pregnant, and the genders were separated to prevent any further unwanted multiplying.” . . .

 

“[Janet] Leigh also revealed to journalist Sue Rhodes ([Rory] Calhoun’s wife) in the Australian Women’s Weekly that an animal other than the film’s central threat freaked her out on set. ‘I was terrified of those bats’ seen in a laboratory scene. ‘The script called for me to pick on up. I just couldn’t do it. And then one of them got out of the cage and started flying all over the place. I thought I was going to scream.’ In the end, [Film director William F.] Claxton reassigned the bat-handling job to [Walt] Whitman.”