We’re not doing Night Of The Lepus, i’m not feeling like talking about that again, and frankly i don’t have anything else to say about that movie, only that while not good, nor that intriguing and throughly laughable… in time i had a new found appreciation for it, after witnessing shit like Beaster Day: Here Comes Peter Cottonhell, also known as “The Beaster Bunny”.
I’ve reviewed this one before for the older italian blog, but it feels like it was aeons ago, i was more naive, i didn’t yet dive proper into the trashy abyss of the homegrown, DIY no budget cinema waters, where often you wonder why the direct didn’t direct a porno instead that week.
So here we have the counter-example, the mirror image of the Polonia Bros output, as in John Baccus mostly makes cheap “porno spoofs” of whatever random movie series or not, giving us stuff like “Playmate Of The Apes”, “Kinky Kong” or the surprisingly recent “Mad Maxine: Frisky Road”, while occasionally making horror stuff without “erotic” in the title, like “Frankenthug”, or “Bloodz VS Wolvez”, just shy at writing these in leet.
This is one of such occasions, where most of the effort is put into the pun-reference to Rankin/Bass’ Here Comes Peter Cottontail (of which this is extensively a parody, but i wouldn’t really known), and the puppet of the “beaster bunny” itself.
The plot? There’s a giant killer monster rabbit offing random douchy in the woody area of a small town. As the asshole mayor thinks the Amish are to blame for the killings, it’s up to a depressing dogcatcher and an aspiring tween actress to stop the monster.
On this, there’s the fact that at least the director realized there’s no point to wait until the last 5 minutes to let you see what passes for the monster, so might as well show it to you in the first 10 minutes… and it doesn’t look much as a rabbit, more like a rat, a bipedal rat, an obvious marionette on a string, crude and badly made on “purpose-necessity” (with this level of budget, “purpose” it’s kind of a meaningless word to throw around), but still better looking than the horrendous digital effects that do remind one of those old FMV games for the Sega CD and the likes.
Even so, getting to see the monster obviously greenscreneed into random scenes where he can’t actually touch/interact with anything.. quickly loses his cheap fun factor, as this movie has the opposite problem, you see the creature too many times, just simply diminishing returns even on the “so bad and crappy looking it’s laughable” factor.
Even that it’s incredibly finite.
If nothing else, you can tell this director it’s far more used in “pornagerie” than monster rampage, not only due to abundant nudity and tits on display (plenty of shots where the actress it’s just shaking them for an audience deprived of nipple and adjacent imagery), you just can tell there’s that sleazy aura, where people might start fucking any moment.
Not that “reason” applies, this is a movie where people are run over by cars with goofy sound effects, should be squashed flat but get only a single severed hand added digitally with crap effects, the “beaster bunny” steals a bra from a girls running with her bahonkas out, a running joke is the young wannabe actress’ father trying to eat something with high colesterol only to be porkblocked, and more boring stuff that’s not even worth lamenting about.
And that’s the main problem, as i kinda wish this had a worse audio mixing, so i could just not hear the plenty of random slurs that are supposed to pass as comedy, the endless drudge of dialogues that -when not offensive – are incredibly boring, the almost complete falling flat of anything actually intended as a joke, the endless parade of filler bullshit scenes that go nowhere and do so at an insufferable pace, the irritating characters and acting that range from crap to just shouting.
There are some moments of hilarity, like when the “rabbit monster” dances to mock a guy, but there are incredibly few and far between, feel accidental, when the movie it’s so engineered to be “so bad it’s good” in a calculated, dishonest way, and it’s just a struggle to get through despite not even reaching 90 minutes, making for one of the worse movie experiences i’ve had…. that month in 2018.
All for a fittingly senseless finale to a movie that just displayed a giant egg in the woods at one point (not the finale), and overdosed on a dutch-angle diet, as if heavily inspired by Battlefield Earth.
The problem with The Beaster Bunny is not its sleaze, nor it being cheap and shitty looking, its bad acting, nor its crap factor.
It’s just another example of these modern bad movies designed to be crap on purpose, it’s pretty obvious to read the intent behind it, but even disregarding that it’s just a pathetic display, desperately trying to be funny and constantly failing due to it being too juvenile and low brow. The rare moments of hilarity are often more unintended, but even when the crappy “rat-rabbit monster” marionette it’s the best thing it has, Beaster Day manages to gradually devalue that by overusing it.
It’s not shocking in its badness, it’s just a boring, unsufferably grating cavalcade of Z-grade trash that ironically outdoes itself in terms of “planned shit factor” to the point it’s far worse than it intended to be, but none of it plays the movie’s advantage or makes watching this anything than an exercise in tedium to see if you can extend your threshold for tolerating cinematic drivel.
Frankly it’s already telling that not even John Baccus proper credited himself, going under the alias of the “Snygg Brothers”.
Even if you enjoy this kind of trash, i’d pass this one up and instead watch the “Easter” segment of the horror anthology Holidays, that’s some good stuff!
Wise Cafe (International) 