Easter Bunny Massacre

A year after graduating high school, several youths in England are invited to a vacation home by a mutual friend thought to be dead. They all show up due to guilt, along with a couple guests, but a mysterious person in a huge bunny mask starts picking 'em off one-by-one. Will anyone survive?

"Easter Bunny Massacre" (2021) is a low-budget Brit slasher with no-name actors influenced by "I Know What You Did Last Summer" and "I'll Always Know What You Did Last Summer" just with a cabin-in-the-woods setting.

I saw the director's previous film and was impressed by the relative proficient filmmaking so decided to give this a shot. The technical quality is actually a slight step down, probably due to much of the flick being shot indoors (as opposed to his other one). But the cast and writing are good for the most part, except for a couple of eye-rolling cliches. The moody score creates a reverent tone, reminiscent of the song "A Deeper Kind of Slumber" from 1997.

Speaking of the tone, I appreciate how the proceedings are kept serious despite the amusing nature of the killer wearing a blood-soaked bunny mask. Yet I couldn't help wondering how the slayer was able to move around so stealthily wearing such an awkward piece. Wouldn't you have to see and hear properly to do what he does?

The female cast is quite good, highlighted by brunette Sarah T. Cohen (Janey), redhead May Kelly (Amy) and blonde Antonia Whillans (Heather).

The movie runs 1 hour, 25 minutes, and was shot in Somerset, England, which is a 3-hour drive west of London.

GRADE: C-/C.

Terrible, don't waste your time and money watching it like they wasted theirs making it.

Amateurish direction and cinematography akin to a student film at very best.

The script writing would be acceptable perhaps if it was written to be purposefully so bad that it was meant to be a comedy.

As a horror film, I had to keep turning it off over and over again; not because it was too scary but because it was so bad.

Promised myself to finish it and much like a dinner spent with terrible people and food you felt like you had wasted your evening, without gaining anything from it.

Begging you not to watch this film, it is not even funny bad, it's just meant for the bin.

A fun film with a good story and fun suspense. I liked the music too. The final scenes were great and I liked the characters. Nice concept, I liked the twist at the end.

.. but the very next, you gave your memory away ... or something along those lines. It doens't always have to fit the song or pun - so no pun intended. Just go with the flow. It is a massacre anyway ... well according to one of the titles of the movie. Of course as others also have noted: you could also go with "I know what you did last summer" ... just replacing summer with Easter.

The blueprint is there - but it makes you feel that the other movie is a citizen kane - compared to this. Try not to - this movie has no chance to withstand that comparison. You could also say that there are some notions of Scream in here ... again a comparison this movie would not survive - it would be a massacre to quote the movie again.

The costume is nice, I reckon the actors look good ... and the cinematography is really not that bad ...

I get it that slasher films have been around a long time now and pretty much every creepy and unsettling mask has been used by some knife-wielding psycho. So, I guess someone thought it would be clever to use an 'Easter Bunny' costume as the maniac chopping the cast up. And that might have worked, if they'd leaned into the general silliness of it all. But instead, the film-makers tried to play this one with a straight face, as if it was an outright horror.

The film begins with a gaggle of twenty-something actors trying to pass themselves off as late teens, partying round a campfire before they head off to uni. Unfortunately, they have a but more of a heavy night than they expected and when they wake up they're all covered in blood and a girl with a weird Anglo-American accent is in pieces. Naturally, they don't call the police, but instead do their best to cover up whatever 'crime' they may or may not have committed and just do their best to live their lives. Unfortunately, a year later, they're all lured to a hotel by someone who knows what they did last summer... sorry Easter. Yes, you may have heard that plot somewhere back in the late nineties.

So the film isn't funny when it could have been. It isn't original. The gore is pretty much non-existent and the film often grinds to a halt sometimes when it realises it hasn't got anything new to say and starts throwing in pointless flashbacks just to pad it out. But - possibly worst of all - is that the dialogue and acting is pretty awful. I won't blame the actors as I've seen a couple of them in other things and they're perfectly fine when given better to work with, but the script lets them down here.

Overall, this film really doesn't have anything going for it, which is a shame, as it could have been a nice, cheesy little entry into the genre, but there just isn't enough here that's original, scary, gory or just good to really recommend it.

Oh, I said it wasn't funny. I take that back. The 'killer rabbit' costume was pretty funny, but that was probably not the film-makers' intention when they designed one of the most unthreatening and unintentionally funny 'murderers' ever.