A dozen years after the release of her cinematically legendary showers sequence and eight years before she would appear with her daughter Jamie Lee Curtis in John Carpenter’s

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atmospheric horror film The Fog, Janet Leigh, along with DeForest Kelley three years after Star Trek grounded, starred in a most unusual SF horror movie 1972’s Night of the Lepus.

Adapted from the satirical SF novel The Year of the Angry Rabbit by Russell Braddon, NOTL’s central conceit is the Arizona countryside suffering nocturnal assaults from mutated giant rabbits.

The film attempts and fails to build credibility for its premise by opening with a faux newscaster intoning seriously about rabbits upsetting the delicate ecological balance in Australia after their introduction to that continent. From there the story moves to Arizona where rancher Hillman is dealing with a rabbit infestation of his own. Rather than deploy harsh poisons to deal with the pests his friend Clark (DeForest Kelley) at the university puts him in contact with a husband/wife team of scientists Roy and Gerry Bennett (Gerry Bennett played by Janet Leigh.) The pair decide that using hormones to make ‘boy rabbits act more like girl rabbits’ is the solution to Hillman’s troubles and begin experimentation on rabbits captured from the ranch. The filmmakers use the Bennett’s young daughter both as clumsy exposition, ‘Mommy what is a control group?’ and the method by which a rabbit already mutated by the artificial is released into the wild to infect the ranch’s rouge population. And yes, the film tries to force the idea that hormonally changing one rabbit somehow infects other without the use of a bacteria or virus. Despite the EPA having been established two years earlier the scientific pair also have no hesitation in developing and deploying an unknown effect into the ecology without significant testing as their timeline from concept to eradication was mere weeks.

The greatest hurdle the filmmakers failed to clear isn’t the lack of character arcs or scientific illiteracy but rather no amount of slow-motion photography on miniature sets and even with fake blood smeared on their snouts, rabbits cannot look credibly frightening. Rabbits as a violent lethal threat belongs solely to the domain of British farce and not in the dying giant animal genre.

I found Night of the Lepus streaming for free on a Roku channel, but they interrupted the movie every ten minutes for a block of five commercials. even minus those interruptions except for comedic entertainment I could not recommend this strange unique movie.