The Beaster Bunny (2014) Review
The Beaster Bunny (2014) Review
A 50-foot man-eating Easter bunny is on the loose and the townsfolk don’t stand a hop in hell. As the bloodthirsty, floppy-eared killer leaves a trail of dismembered corpses, the town’s only chance of survival rests with a wannabe actress and a crazy dog-catcher. God help them!
There’s horror flicks for pretty much every notable calendar date there is, Halloween, Christmas, Friday the 13th, April Fool’s Day, hell, even Mother’s Day gets one, but Easter? Nah, not really! But here’s The Beaster Bunny (originally entitled Beaster Day: Here Comes Peter Cottonhell), playing up a B-movie concept for laughs on a low budget.
Written and directed by The Snygg Brothers, The Beaster Bunny is intended as a parody of 1971’s Here Comes Peter Cottontail (I haven’t seen it). It’s short, at just an hour and nineteen minutes, and to begin with everything promises to be so bad that it’s good. That promise is short-lived. I really wanted to like this, I really did.
The Beaster Bunny is heavily padded out, a twenty minute version would be been a better – tighter with MUCH less flab. The stream of killings, roughly one every five minutes, should appeal to the less discerning genre fans but for me it became wearisome quickly. I like a plot to hang my laughs on not an endless parade of victims for the titular beast. You do get the sense that everyone involved were passionate about having fun making the film but what a shame that the fun doesn’t filter through to the viewer.
I can overlook the low production values, the variable acting, the very iffy effects work, as these are staple ingredients of a B-movie. What I can’t overlook is a finished product that lacks the intended laughs. If you want to see a really funny large-rabbit-attack check out 1972’s The Night of the Lepus instead which, paradoxically, wanted to be taken seriously but actually ended up being what this movie so desperately, and deliberately, wanted to be instead. The rabbit in Monty Python and the Holy Grail got more laughs in much less time.
