Horror Show

[Scorpio]

Does anyone remember a TV horror drama called ' Snow Beast '. It was set in a skiing resort in the Rockies,in the early eighties. The beast scared me; i was about seven.

[RivkahChaya]

I just had a revelation: we accidentally left the TV on when I went to take my son to school, and when we got back Max and Ruby was on. That's showed has always unnerved me, because Max is one creepy little lepus, even if he's only supposed to be about two. It wouldn't surprise me if he grew up to be a serial killer.

[RivkahChaya]

I'm still waiting for the docudrama of the time that then-Pres. Carter was attacked by a "swamp rabbit."





ETA: the capybaras mentioned in the link are really quite adorable.

[Cogidubnus]

Fetch thou the Holy Handgrenade (First book of Armnaments)

The best Killer Bunny is still the one in Python's Holy Grail!

All the best

Dave

[RivkahChaya]

Night of the Lepus was hilarious.
They basically set a bunch of rabbits loose in a doll house and film them nuzzling the toy furniture in slow motion. Classic.

I don't think that was slow motion. I think that how real, tame rabbits move when they are that well-fed, and have very little motive to do much of anything. [/sarcasm]

[Magpie]

Night of the Lepus was hilarious.
They basically set a bunch of rabbits loose in a doll house and film them nuzzling the toy furniture in slow motion. Classic.

The worse "nature's revenge" movie ever was "Frogs" however. It was truly, truly awful. Not even funny awful.

[Magpie]

Have you ever seen Mystery of the Wax Museum? !

Mystery of the Wax Museum is available on Youtube, for anyone who's interested.

[Scorpio]

Can anyone remember a movie called ' The warning '. I remember flying jelly fish of possible extra terrestrial origin landing on people. This movie dates from about 1980 and, along with a dire effort called Zombie Lake, is one of the first VHS horrors that i can recall.

[RivkahChaya]

"Killer bunny" has got to be an oxymoron.

Google an image of Night of the Lepus. The bunnies are all well-fed and groomed, and couldn't be more pet-like if they were wearing ribbons tied around their necks.

It's hard to imagine how this film got green-lighted in the first place, but now that I think about it, someone may have been dropping acid, and watching that already-trippy Paramount Alice in Wonderland, or maybe just reading Alice in Wonderland with the Tenniel March Hare. Maybe on the story board, it looked scary, but after they'd already done some filming, and paid Janet Leigh, they discovered that no one had any trained hares, only bunnies, suitable for pulling out of top hats.

I mean, I'm not going to say that the March Hare in the Tim Burton movie is the scariest thing ever, but he has that unpredictability of that crazy, little guy always spoiling for a fight, who was scary because he had no sense of self-preservation, and would risk his life just to give you a black eye.

[kensei]

Janet Leigh was in Night of the Lepus, which is even weirder-- she must have lost a bet.

The worst part is that saying it's about killer rabbits is giving it too much credit. It's about killer bunnies. Fluffy little bunnies. The animal people can barely get them to do anything except sit around and sniff, and look like they're waiting to get pet. They have to resort to a really phony hand-puppet for the actual attacks.

I mean, there is a sort of scary type of lepus, if anyone has ever seen a wild hare. Their fur grows in all directions, they have a mean glare in their eyes, usually some notches in their ears, and I'm sure they have Harley-Davidson tattoos under the fur. They look like they smoke unfiltered Camels, and I wouldn't want to meet a 200 lb. one in a dark alley.

But I guess by the same token, no one has a passel of trained ones all cinema-ready. So instead, we got fwuffy, cuddwy bunnies, that no matter how out-sized the furniture, were cuuuuute!

Many thanks for the huge laugh you just gave me. Wild hares are called "jack rabbits" where I live and yes, they are bigger and much less cute than their little cottontail cousins. As for "Night of the Lepus," it's all so outrageous that I want to describe how it ends. It's such an obscure movie that I doubt many are eager to go track it down and watch it, but just in case, SPOILER ALERT! If you don't want to know, stop reading now.

There are hundreds of lion-sized killer bunnies on the rampage. Someone notices that there is a railroad in their path and gets the bright idea of electrifying it. Every single rabbit then ends up crispy-fried as they hit the tracks, despite the fact that after a point there would be a pile of bodies that the ones in the back would just be vaulting over. Unless the current passes through the bodies enough to still be lethal? I don't know, it's been many years since I saw it. I just remember that it was absolutely hilarious.

[Scorpio]

I have vague memories of various beast movies from yore ( they don't seem to make them that much anymore ). Plagues of killer frogs, homicidal Baboon troops,hungry Piranha packs, and evil wild-pigs. The pigs are from ' Hannibal ', which is quite modern, and they constitute only a small part of the film.

[RivkahChaya]

I guess i am referring to a horror sub-genre which began with ' Peeping Tom ' and ' Psycho ' . It's a genre that owes little to the supernatural, but had more contemporary themes. I think Wes Cravens early stuff and John Carpenters ' Halloween ' seemed to be informed by these movies.

Have you ever seen Mystery of the Wax Museum? it was a reporter-as-detective film when it came out in 1932 (and an early color film, using a 2-color process, before technicolor was invented). The reporter-as-detective was very popular in the 1930s, as newspaper reporter was a very romantic (or, romanticized) sort of occupation (my paternal grandfather was actually a newspaper reporter during the depression, and had the crime beat for a while). Part of it was probably the fact that reporters always had a lot of work during the depression, and back then, it was a career you could get into with just a high school diploma (although, that meant more then), and a lot of determination.

Anyway, MWM gets classified as a horror film now, mainly because the remake (from something like 1960) with Vincent Price, called House of Wax, is classified that way. But it's a about a serial killer, with a really gruesome MO, and a really twisted motive, and also a climax that must have been a real shocker to audiences in 1932, who hadn't seen anything like it before. It's been copied so many times, that the original now seems a little hackneyed, which is unfortunate (something a lot of old films, like 42nd Street), go through).

But, as far as animal attacks, the 1933 King Kong was still pretty scary when I saw it in the 1970s. Now, of course, the lack of motion blur makes the giant ape less convincing next to CGI dinosaurs and dragons, but as far as what it is about, it's practically a Faustian story, and is certainly about hubris, and being hoist by your own petard. Given that an awful lot of people in 1933 were looking for a magic way to make a fast buck, the film was very topical.

Janet Leigh was in Night of the Lepus, which is even weirder-- she must have lost a bet.

The worst part is that saying it's about killer rabbits is giving it too much credit. It's about killer bunnies. Fluffy little bunnies. The animal people can barely get them to do anything except sit around and sniff, and look like they're waiting to get pet. They have to resort to a really phony hand-puppet for the actual attacks.

I mean, there is a sort of scary type of lepus, if anyone has ever seen a wild hare. Their fur grows in all directions, they have a mean glare in their eyes, usually some notches in their ears, and I'm sure they have Harley-Davidson tattoos under the fur. They look like they smoke unfiltered Camels, and I wouldn't want to meet a 200 lb. one in a dark alley.

But I guess by the same token, no one has a passel of trained ones all cinema-ready. So instead, we got fwuffy, cuddwy bunnies, that no matter how out-sized the furniture, were cuuuuute!

[sdreid]

There were always man vs. lion movies and such but I think the first "killer animal" horror film like we are speaking of here was The Naked Jungle from 1954. I was 7 or 8 when I saw it first run at the theater in 54 and it scared the crap out of me.

Regarding The Ghost and the Darkness, it was a sort of remake of Bwana Devil which I also saw IN 3-D at the theater when I was 5 or 6 in 1952.

Before we got a TV in 1955, we would see 4-9 movies a week at both drive-in and indoor theaters.

[Scorpio]

Yes, "Night of the Lepus"! Can you believe DeForest Kelly from "Star Trek" was in that?

A lot of recognisable faces in horror movies . William Shatner was in some strange Demon flick;It was called The Gargoyles or something.

[kensei]

I particularly remember ' Zoltan:Hound of Dracula ' and ' Night of the Lepus '
( mutant rabbits ) making an impression.

Yes, "Night of the Lepus"! Can you believe DeForest Kelly from "Star Trek" was in that?