Killer bunnies

Okay, I've been trying to get through Night of the Lepus for about a week now. For those of you not in the know, this is a 1972 movie about giant killer rabbits in Arizona. Now read that sentence again. Right, I know--Arizona, of all places?

Just kidding.

For those of you still not in the know, here's a picture that pretty much tells you everything you need to understand about Night of the Lepus:

As you can see, there are 1. ) giant bunnies with cuddly twitchy faintly obscene twitching noses, and there are 2.) people with their throats ripped open. That's pretty much the extent of the movie's interest. It's worth noting however that fuzzy soft cuddly bunnies are really really cute and entirely unthreatening to almost everybody in the omniverse apart from certain grass-based organisms, so splashing their incisors with blood and having them run through the picture in slo-mo (in order to, I guess, enhance their fearsome ferocity or something) actually does little to make them any scarier. There is, however, a great "burble-burble" electro-soundtrack underscoring their villainous rampages which, against all the odds, does make the proceedings a trifle creepy.

But what truly elevates this movie from "enjoyable kitsch" to near-perfection is the cast, which includes Janet Leigh (remember Psycho?) and DeForest Kelly, aka Dr McCoy on the original Star Trek. He ambles around with a mustache and a leather jacket but still looks like he'd rather be on some alien planet--well he's pretty close, it is Arizona*--with Kirk and Spock and all the rest. The grant blood-sucking bunny rabbits, you know, just add to this feeling of being trapped somewhere in a really long, really bad Star Trek episode.

*Just kidding, cowboys. I lived in Tucson for 7 years and loved loved loved it.