Put Your Feet Up and Show Them Some TLC
March 28, 2025
Twin Fest Louisiana moved to Saturday, April 6 due to inclement weather
March 28, 2025
Humans like scary movies. That’s likely because they live a decidedly un-scary life free from the threat of forest predators—like themselves. However, it seems that rabbits have become their favorite villains in such movies. I find this quite ironic because we rabbits are generally considered cute and cuddly and furry and warm, and, outside of the occasional raid on a vegetable garden, we tend to mind our own business. Instead, movie rabbits are often given overtly human behaviors–walking on two legs, carrying a gun, robbing a bank, drawing blood, speaking–all evil things that cause turmoil. It’s as if humans use the pleasant fictions of movies to displace their worst characteristics onto an innocent and truly un-evil species. Namely mine.
Yet here I am, in another Spring, suffering again the indignity of humans and their mass consumption of my chocolate effigies as well as those of unhatched rabbit eggs. Unfortunately for me and my kind, the unprecedented snows earlier this year have left our foraging lands (namely, your gardens) devoid of nutritive vegetable eats, and now I must work for food. For this reason, I have become a for-pay movie critic, currently reviewing for your entertainment what is apparently your favorite human-invented film genre: scary rabbit movies.
Night of the Lepus (1972). Producer A.C. Lyles spent his career making Western films. This was his first venture into sci-fi. Fortunately, thought human audiences, it was his last. The plot involves giant, carnivorous rabbits that eat their way through small towns and townspeople somewhere in the Southwest. “Lepus” stars Janet Leigh (leading actress in Hitchcock’s “Psycho” and also mother of Jamie Lee Curtis), Deforest Kelley (Bones in the original “Star Trek” series), and lots of ketchup smeared across the cheeks and whiskers of rabbits as well as across the mutilated bodies of formerly defiant townspeople strewn across fields and roadsides. Rabbits think filming their actor brethren next to tiny human dolls, not to mention dressing human stunt actors in rabbit costumes for attack scenes, is poor cinematography. But “Lepus” is a great revenge movie like all the Rockys between II and V. For this alone, I forgive all the campiness and poor production: Any film of rabbits exacting revenge over oppressive, rifle-toting, stew-cooking killer humans gets the top rating of five-stars in my book. ★★★★★
Harvey (1950). Generally considered a comedy, any movie putting Oscar-winner Jimmy Stewart together with a 6-foot tall invisible rabbit (named Harvey) as a drinking partner (or I should say bar-“hopping” partner) is truly a scary one. A series of schemes and misdiagnoses sees characters in and out of a sanitorium and nearly getting cured of Harvey visions by injection of a mysterious tranquilizer called Formula 977. The movie stereotypes Harvey as a good-luck charm, but fortunately luck is provided by the whole imaginary rabbit body and not morbidly by a rabbit’s foot alone. The movie symbolically illustrates the point that rabbits prefer staying invisible due to their status in the food chain. The story tickled my whiskers a few times. ★★★
Fatal Attraction (1987). Two Oscar winners, Glen Close and Michael Douglas, star in this revenge-ridden psycho-drama about the aftermath of an abruptly ended sexual affair. But in the mess of human infidelity, why must an innocent rabbit get killed? Maybe instead one or both of the human infidels should be bubbling in that boiling pot of chicken stock. Top-grossing human film of its year, mature and powerful plot, but demerited four stars for cruelty to my species. ★
Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975). “Holy Grail” is hardly a rabbit move. (And hardly scary.) However, the Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog from Scene 31, with its “nasty, big, pointy teeth” and “a viscous streak a mile wide” is clearly the movie’s scary star as it attacks Arthur’s knights in another series of ketchup-laden special effects. Ah, the good-ole Middle Ages, when club-waving, sword-wielding, arrow-bowing rabbits threw the gauntlet down on lesser beings, like humans–at least in the margins of Medieval manuscripts. I laughed aloud. ★★★★
Donnie Darko (2001). Like Jimmy Stewart’s “Harvey,” Jake Gylenhaal’s “Frank” is a large rabbit that only his character can see. Unlike Harvey, who is really an imaginary rabbit, Frank is an imaginary man dressed in a rabbit suit, and his is the voice convincing Gylenhaal’s Donnie to commit crimes. Richard Kelly’s directorial debut is intelligent. Gylenhaal’s troubled teenager is daring. Docked two stars for imposing human criminality upon a rabbit. ★★★
Watership Down (1978). An award-winning animated film based on a wonderfully inventive novel by Richard Adams and brilliant descriptions of wild rabbit behavior by British naturalist Ronald Lockley. Complete with rabbit poetry, mythology, societal politics, and language. Regrettably, a total of 63 rabbits die in this film, some violently and involving animated ketchup. Like some humans, I don’t let my kits watch this one. Should be called “Watership Downer” for its dismal depiction of rabbit life. I live it, and I don’t need a cartoon to tell me about it. ★★
Rabbit à la Berlin (2009). An incredible Oscar-nominated documentary called “the true story of the Berlin Wall through the eyes of rabbits.” My East German brethren were filmed in the wild as they watched through barbed-wire spirals and cracks between bricks the oppression and torture of humans trying to cross the Wall with futility. Now that the Wall has been torn down, rabbits “are still learning how to live in the free world, same as [the humans] of Eastern Europe.” A poignant reminder of the conflicted times humans face today. Brilliant film. ★★★★★
Incidentally, after weaning on your garden corn for years, I have become fond of movie popcorn.
