The Beaster Bunny (2014)

It's Easter on Sunday! And I've been saving something for this special week, ever since I covered Killer Piñata during Spooky Season last year. If there's one thing I love apart from old sci-fi movies, it's really ridiculous, over-the-top nonsense movies. The Beaster Bunny, A.K.A Beaster Day: Here Comes Peter Cottonhell is a delightful* little movie about a 50 foot murderous fucking Easter bunny that ruthlessly and gruesomely slaughters the innocent local townfolk. *- I say delightful because in standard format, typing this before I actually start watching it... But, fucking hell, I saw this inside the "Recommended" tab and it went straight on my watchlist. Saved away in wait for the moment it becomes thematically relevant again. And here we are. Chocolate Egg weekend. And I can finally subject myself to this absolute bollocks and pass it off as "oh, I had to cover it for Easter on the blog." like that somehow makes it ok.

Iiiit's the opening 6 minutes and so far we have had some guy slag off his aged dad at his wedding only to get his hand chopped off, some weird kid shoving socks down his pants and some really old guy whinging at his... wife? because she won't let him eat bacon.... before we get our first confirmed kill by the Bunny and oh fucking hell it's incredible. Some of the worst special effects I think I've ever watched. Anyway... after getting passed over as "Dog Catcher of the Year", Doug (Peter Sullivan) (coincidentally, also the weird sock guy from earlier) doesn't really take it very well and struggles with his jealousy over winner and fellow employee Hector (Jon Arthur), but he quickly finds a distraction when daughter of aforementioned bacon rager, Brenda (Marisol Custodio) ends up having to work for "Dog Catchers int the Rye" (which... thematically doesn't even make sense I mean... oh what's the point?) after her parents threaten to chuck her out otherwise and Doug assumes responsibility for training her up. After wiping out 3,4,5, 6 of the towns resident big boobed attractive brunette ladies... Peter Cottonhell certainly has a type, there might just be more boobs and bums in this thing than Caligula... but uh yea this is err... objectively one of the worst things I've ever watched... But uh... after running out of boobie models, the bunny starts turning on men as well, killing one of the Dog Catchers in the Rye, but the weed smoking, lady fondling Mayor Farnsworth (John Paul Fedele) tries to cover up the problem, desperate to keep his Easter Day Festival on the schedule so that he can fondle more boobs. This is the first discernible plot point in the entire movie and we are 47 minutes in. Which is over halfway. But OH WAIT! There's more, first of Mayor Farnsworth discovers there is a giant bloody egg in the middle of the woods somewhere. And whilst that's a thing, Brenda has her first brush with the bunny when, after falling out with Doug when she confesses to him she fancies Hector, the bunny creeps up on her whilst she's alone and belches out a severed foot which causes her to run off in panic and steal Dougs' car. He seems more concerned about the car. With pressure increasing on Mayor Farnsworth, Hector is sent into the woods to capture the assumed wild animal that is killing everybody but after a showdown with the bunny he ends up as just another disembowelled victim. Deciding to avenge Hector's death in hopes it might impress Brenda enough to put his willy in her mouth, Doug heads out in the woods, discovers the giant fucking bunny puppet and then crashes back into the dog catchers but nobody will believe him. Discovering that it's up to him and him alone to save the town from a murderous marionette of a marsupial... are... are bunnies marsupials? He runs around waving his arms alot and screaming and yeah ok, there is an amusing scene where some guy tells him to "get the fuck off my porch" which was probably funny for the wrong reasons... but anyway he runs around a lot screaming until he gets taken out by a man with a bible. Mayor Farnsworth decides to change tact and blames all of the recent horrific mutilations on Doug, calling him a "psychopathic, serial killing dog catcher man." before announcing that the Easter Festival is still going ahead. At said Easter Festival (which I can't work out if it was an actual Easter festival and they filmed at it, or if they just hired a fuck load of extras?) everyone is having a lovely time until the big bunny crashes the party, squashing Mayor Farnsworth into a bloodstained puddle on the floor and generally rampaging very poorly and unconvincingly. Brenda "manages" to make it home amongst the chaos where she finds... her dad in an all in one babygrow trying to eat bacon from a fishing rod being dangled by his girlfriend... no really. They have an argument because why not at this point? And then Brenda finds where he keeps the guns, and the dude has like a small fucking armoury in his basement?! She takes a gun, rescues Doug from the mental institute who could be wacked out of his face on drugs this point, or not, it's uh... difficult to tell. She dresses him as a carrot, and uses him as bait to lure the bunny out into the open where just as it... "hops"... into view from a rooftop she unloads a few shotgun shells in his head until it collapses and dies.

OOH OHOOOLY CHRISTMAS this was bollocks of the finest vintage. I have watched some decidedly terrible, terrible garbage since I started this blog, but honey mustard! This is one of the worst pieces of shit I have ever watched. There are very few movies that I wanted to shut off before I got to the end, Creeping Terror, Beast of Yucca Flats, that football movie, and this one. I almost gave up on it like half hour from the end but I guess, out of morbid curiosity, I just wanted to see how this horrifying car crash of a movie played out. I am just utterly flabbergasted at how bad this was. An interesting experiment into how little effort you can put into making a movie and still have what could loosely be defined as some kind of movie at the end of production.

I'll be frank, I am not going to waste a lot of effort on this one. They clearly didn't fucking bother so why should I? The bunny was absolutely fucking awful. So obviously some kind of creepy, weird puppet filmed in front of a green screen and then layered over the top of the movie. It's movements weren't just un-natural and jerky, they were genuinely completely un-fucking-realistic. The absolute minimal amount of effort was put into it. And I dunno if that was the point? Like maybe I'm not in on the joke? And it was supposed to look so ridiculously fake, but in any event it did. And it was just embarrassing.

Also the sound production was just as horrendous as the bunny. I thought my earphones were playing up? Sounded like the audio was tracked over the production after the movie was shot and there was these moments of just complete dead silence before the hum of background noise kicked in microseconds before a line of dialogue. And there was varying degrees of quality with each recording. Maybe it wouldn't be so obvious if you weren't using earphones, but it was painfully obvious to me and quite obviously produced using the cheapest and least amount of work possible in order to pull off having a dialogue track.

And nobody is getting out of this one with any credibility left I'm afraid. if you put a gun to my head and demand that I at least say something positive then I will give John Paul Fedele some credit for his portrayal as the pot smoking, lady loving Mayor Farnsworth who succeeded in having a character that wasn't either A) vanilla or B) like scraping nails down a chalkboard. Everyone else can fuck off. Just some of the most entry level acting I think I've ever witnessed committed to a "finished" product.

And yeah that's it, I'm not wasting any more energy on this. I already fucked 1 hour 23 minutes of my life up the wall to watch it? What more do you want from me? Bunny was shit. Story was shit. Special effects were shit. Acting was shit. Like chowing down on a bowl of bunny droppings. This was an Easter Egg sized turd. And not one of those little ones either. I'm talking about those deluxe sized eggs, the ones that have like fancy decorations on them and stuff and are stupidly expensive despite being hollow inside. Yeah, one of those. Only in turd form. ZERO STARS.