13 Bunnies of Halloween #13

While I'm slightly ashamed to give any fresh attention to the movie where John Landis killed three people through an excess of arrogance and negligence, the final two portions of Twilight Zone: The Movie -- the one called "It's a Good Life" directed by Joe Dante which will be the subject of our post today, as well as the fourth and final segment where Mad Max and Babe genius George Miller reworked the infamous "Nightmare at 20,000" feet story -- are too good to live unloved in the world, and are worthy of seeking out.

Dante's in particular brings me great joy -- the man who made the Gremlins movies unleashed on the story of a tyrannical boy with the ability to wish anything into existence with a cast that includes Kathleen Quinlin, Dick Miller, Nancy Cartwright, and the fellow on display in these gifs, the great "best friend of Monty Clift" Kevin McCarthy??? Yes please. Forced to do "a trick" for the boy's captive audience all seems alright at first until...

... all is very much not alright. (Sidenote: I deeply love the smooth arm movement McCarthy does in the above shot -- what a goddamned professional.)  It should be noted that the monster effects in this segment were created by the legend Rob Bottin, who did the monsters in John Carpenter's The Thing -- you can very much see the bridge between those abominations and the Looney Tunes cartoons Dante is referencing throughout this segment -- that rabbit in the hat looks exactly like what would have happened if Bugs Bunny had been taken over by the defrosted alien parasite.

I have heard a lot of people my age had nightmares about this segment and the monster rabbit in particular, but I don't remember seeing this as a kid and if I did I apparently wasn't bothered by it. Man what a hard ass I was. Anyway this thirteenth bunny rabbit is my gift to you, here on Halloween! Check out all the "13 Bunnies of Halloween" right here -- now back into the hat with them until whatever nonsense I decide to count down in 2024...

13 Bunnies of Halloween #12

At the end of Eli Roth's Cabin Fever (2002) our sort-of hero Paul (Rider Strong) has made it to the hospital after a string of, you know, negative set-backs. Up to and including the fact that he's infected with the deadly plague that's killed all of his friends in horrifically gruesome ways right in front of him over the course of the past couple of days. And as he's wheeled down the hallway he looks into one of the rooms and he sees a giant bunny man holding a stack of pancakes and a syringe.

As one does. As batshit at the moment is, it is a silly reference to something that had come earlier in the film -- that little blond boy on the gurney is the same little boy who bit Paul on the hand at the start of the film, and who later had a freak-out where he started screaming" Pancakes!!!" while showing off some wild tae kwan do moves...

No, none of this ever made "sense" but there is a throughline to the nonsense, at least! (Also -- the bunny's syringe is one hundred percent loaded with maple syrup right? I think that's a given.) As far as I know Eli Roth has never said what the hell was going on here -- this piece here says that Roth saw the kid actor practising his moves on the day of filming and decided to give him a showcase, but that doesn't explain bunnies or pancakes. The best explanation seems to be it's a reference to the equally surreal bear-suit moment in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining...

... where logic's meant to have fully leapt out the window and we've entered the land of madness. And that works fine for me. Also Roth is friends with Richard Kelly (recall his cameo in Southland Tales) so manybe there's some Frank from Donnie Darko in there  as well. Whatever the case nobody's talking, as the film's end credits make perfectly clear:

13 Bunnies of Halloween #11

I did a "Ways Not To Die" post on the so-called "Rabbit of Caerbannog" in Monty Python and the Holy Grail way back in 2011 -- click here to see that and be entertained by some of my earliest attempts at making gifs! They're very poor.

Hard to believe there was a time before gifs but then I have been doing this shit for a very long time. Anyway this was an obvious entry for my "13 Bunnies of Halloween" list, but what is there to be said? Killer Bunnies are funny, the end. Oh here is a thing I literally just learned ten seconds ago off of Wikipedia: the "Rabbit of Caerbannog" is based on one of the little scenes carved into the side of Notre Dame of a knight being scared of a rabbit, meant to exemplify cowardice. Poor guy. What a legacy! Whoever carved that was a dick, putting that guy's lamest moment in stone for all eternity. Just picture it -- that guy's all excited to go visit the big fancy church that just got built and everybody's giggling as he walks past and then he sees it. His humiliation. "I just saw something moving out of the corner of my eye," he cries, "I didn't know what the hell it was!" And then everybody laughs harder. That's the kind of thing that will haunt you every time you're in the shower, left alone with your thoughts. What bastards.

13 Bunnies of Halloween #10

I love that "Bunny Boiler" has become synonymous with "Crazy Bitch" thanks to Fatal Attraction, this our tenth entry in our "13 Bunnies of Halloween" countdown -- this movie has gifted so much to the world! Most of it sexist, sure, but let's set that aside and just enjoy the inherent pleasure in Glenn Close murdering a little girl's pet and putting it in a big pot on the family stove for them to discover when they get home. That's commitment, man. We could all learn a little something from her about a dedication to one's craft. Anyway I love Adrian Lyne's cross-cutting in this scene - the little girl running to the cage, Anne Archer walking slowing to the pot, and their simultaneous screams with Michael Douglas caught between them. You did this, Dan!

13 Bunnies of Halloween #9

Yes I am aware that the rabbit in Robert Eggers' The Witch isn't a rabbit, it's a hare, but you'll never convince me that distinction matters to anyone who's not a rabbit, a hare, or an asshole. So I am including it on this list and if you're one of the three types listed above get over it!  I mean, you're possibly a rabbit who is reading a blog -- you should have other things on your mind! Anyway Robert Eggers is of course one of the assholes (I call him an asshole with love in my heart) who insists upon slapping anyone in the mouth who calls the hare in The Witch a rabbit; here is his answer to a question about the "scary looking rabbit" in the movie (via), and yes you should note the overlap between what he says and the quote I shared from Night of the Lepus star Janet Leigh earlier this week on how bunnies aren't scary:

"It’s a hare: and that’s the difference. There aren’t many scary-looking rabbits. But Google ‘European brown hare’ and they all look pretty wily... witches and hares go way back in western European folklore. It’s an archetype rattling around in our unconsciousness."

13 Bunnies of Halloween #8

As far as "disgusting hillbilly stereotypes who get slaughtered by Jason Voorhees" go, Harold and Edna (Steve Susskind and Cheri "Not Sandy Dennis" Maugans) from the opening scene of Friday the 13th: Part III aren't the worst (that honor definitely goes to Junior and Ethel in A New Beginning -- ugh they're gross). Edna is a shrill nag and Harold is a slob but hey at least he loves his bunnies!

That humanizes him, at least. And that's what counts as "character building" by this point in the franchise. But Harold really should've listened to that rabbit who started freaking out, and hopped for the hills when he had the chance because there's a snake in your bunny-house, dude. And that's not even a metaphor about the way Jason Voorhees will be murdering him and his shrill wife in a minute, either. It's literal.

A snake in the bunny house!

Fact: there is nothing better than all of the cheap 

3D gags in this movie. Also literal -- the literal best things ever. 

13 Bunnies of Halloween #7

I could hardly do a countdown of the "13 Bunnies of Halloween" and not mention the legendarily awful 1972 "Animals Run Amok" disaster Night of the Lepus, now could I? Starring Janet Leigh and Rory Calhoun (I mean wtf) this movie is about what happens when a rancher decides to be nice and stop poisoning the bunnies that have taken over his land -- he gets advice from some egghead scientists...

... who advise injecting them with hormones to disrupt their breeding cycle. Yeah great plan, eggheads! Inevitably before you know it the bunnies are ten-foot-tall bloodthirsty monsters hop hop hopping the town and all of its inhabitants flat as bloody pancake batter. 

This terrible movie deserves every ounce of the ridicule it gets, but nevertheless I miss living in a world where somebody thought this movie was a good idea and got name actors to star in it. I will allow Janet Leigh the final word on the film, as she reflected later on:

"No one put a gun to my head and said I had to do it. What no one realized was that, no matter what you do, a bunny rabbit is a bunny rabbit [laughs]. A rat, that can be menacing—so can a frog. Spiders or scorpions or alligators, they could all work in that situation, and they have. But a bunny rabbit?! How can you make a bunny rabbit menacing?"

That said, this movie does have a great poster:

13 Bunnies of Halloween #6

Have you ever seen the 1989 Aussie horror-ish flick Celia? (It's available to watch on YouTube if not -- or you can buy the Region 2 blu-ray from SecondRun which is what I did, and it was worth it.) It tells the story of the hyperactively imaginitive young girl Celia (Rebecca Smart) in Melbourne in the late 1950s who wants nothing more than to have a pet rabbit of her own. And yes the gif above is a spoiler, I suppose -- she eventually gets her rabbit! And because Celia is awesome she names it Murgatroyd. But it takes awhile to get to Murgatroyd -- half the film is her pining away for her own pet bunny, drawing it...

... and also dealing with the horrible bully Stephanie in her class who makes her own nasty little drawing about Celia's bunny-ward desires...

Don't worry though, Stephanie gets what's coming to her. They all get what's coming to them!!! Celia is not to be trifled with, try though they might. Which is to say that Celia is a goddamned legend as far as I'm concerned. Or she should be. She's put through the wringer and comes out a total hard-ass by the end -- Celia basically has the same character arc as Dutch, Arnold Schwarzenegger's character in Predator, and by the end I'd put money on her in a battle between those two. 

The film is set during the "Red Scare" in Austrailia and I suppose there's lot of symbolism involving the way that Celia's parents and community drive out the nice Marxists who live next door to them with the "rabbit plague" that's happening simultaneously -- we see lots of incredible newsreels from the time warning about Myxomatosis, the rabbit disease that also happens to be the title of a Radiohead song.

Anyway if you're an animal lover Celia is a tough sit -- poor little Murgatroyd does not have an easy life. But that made Celia perfect for an entry in our "13 Bunnies of Halloween" list! So all your suffering was worth it, Murgatroyd. He's the Jesus Christ of bunny rabbits, he is!

13 Bunnies of Halloween #5

Frank says Sundays are for rest.

13 Bunnies of Halloween #4

I'm just now realizing I have never sat down and watched the entire run of David Lynch's short film series called Rabbits -- he calls it a sitcom, but I think we can all agree that David Lynch is nuts. I say that with love! Anyway the entire eight-episode run is on YouTube as seen above -- and there are portions of it inside of Lynch's film Inland Empire of course. We should all spend our Saturday afternoons watching it. And did you know that Mulholland Drive stars Naomi Watts and Laura Elena Harring are two of the people in rabbit costumes? Well they are. Anyway the only place that these shorts have been ofificially released were in a DVD set that came out in 2008 which is woefully out-of-print, going for 300 bucks nowadays, so cherish that YouTube link. One day when we're all dust that YouTube link is all thatb will be left of us!

13 Bunnies of Halloween #3

For today's entrant in our "13 Bunnies of Halloween" list for 2023 we're sticking with one of cinema's greatest rabbit representations -- the crazed maniac horror-show that is 1978's animated adaptation of English author Richard Adams' 1972 book Watership Down. Telling the apocalyptic tale of a fluffle of bunnies -- and yes the word for a group of bunnies is a "fluffle" and how fucking adorbs is that? -- traversing dangerous countryside trying to make a new home for themselves (and getting summarily torn to shreds for so doing), this is one of those movies made specifically to give kids nightmares... meaning this is my kinda movie. Weirdly I only saw it for the first time six years ago! Of course I came right here and did a post devoted to its horrors though -- see that here -- because this kind of toony terror gets us positively giddy. There's no bouncing back from this one!

13 Bunnies of Halloween #2

Today's second entry in our "13 Bunnies of Halloween" series takes us to Jordan Peele's 2019 film Us, which is positively hoppin' with lil' cotton-tailed creatures, literally from its opening credits  on. 

In the practical sense, we find out the rabbits are there as food for the tethered folks who all live down below (if you have no idea what I am talking about because you haven't seen the movie, just go watch the movie; I am not explaining this complicated movie right now) -- and yes they eat the rabbits raw, and yes that is hella gross. But why bunnies? Just what the hell do all of those bunnies mean? There are a couple of answers, straight from the mouth of Peele himself. Here is one explanation (via):

"They symbolize a lot of different things... The main connection to me was Easter. This story is a dark Easter of sorts." Red, the doppelgänger to Lupita Nyong'o's Adelaide, "is The Messiah," the writer-director explains, "who's rising from the hole [from] which she was left for dead." As for the larger meaning behind those bunnies: "The animals in my story represent this battle between science and religion," Peele says. "I tend to like to explore the gray area where religion and magic and the unexplainable meet science. Between the two you have an abomination, a metaphor for humanity."

But as profound a reasoning as all of that sounds, Peele also lets on to one other bit of reasoning -- he just finds rabbits fucking creepy. As he told the Guardian: "They’re adorable but they terrify me at the same time... and they got those scissor-like ears that creep me out.” Did somebody say scissors?

We really are blessed to be living in the time of Jordan Peele making horror movies y'all. His ability to whittle things down to some rich yet bizarre iconography is absolutely peerless at the moment, and I say that as a person who found Get Out a little bit overrated at the time of its release. Three movies in now and a better, fuller sense of his voice feels clear to me, and... yeah, we're blessed. Bring on the next one!

"Rabbits... they have the brain like a sociopath." @JordanPeele explains how nature's cuddly creatures are the most terrifying animals around. #UsMovie pic.twitter.com/94FYwPRjvF

— Rotten Tomatoes (@RottenTomatoes) March 21, 2019

13 Bunnies of Halloween #1

It's 13 days until Halloween, Halloween! And you know what that means -- every year I do a list of 13 somethings from the movies, usually horror movies but not always, that will help to get us in the Halloween mood. (Last year I did Toilets, for example. Because obviously.) And since it's The Year of the Rabbit this year, I figured it was as good a time as any to catch ourselves some "Bunny Pox" and countdown all the unholy hoppers of All Hallows! And we're kicking things off here with Harry, the truly repulsive giant bunny rabbit comedian slash sex addict from Peter Jackson's 1989 variety-show monstrosity Meet the Feebles, because why not? There are rumors going around that Jackson is working on 4K restorations of his early movies right now and we for one can't wait to watch Harry here pop his pustules and puke his guts out in glorious 4K -- exactly what the format has been missing. Hoppy Halloween Season, everyone!