Giant rabbits and a lot of action.
Rabbits have such a good reputation that those of us who don't farm or garden don't often think of the fact that these adorable, fuzzy critters that bounce around all over the place can be considered pests by those who do farm or garden. So director William F. Claxton's 1972 film Night of the Lepus starts off with footage that's meant to be a reality check - footage shot during a "plague of rabbits" in 1954 Australia. And I take the movie at its word that this really is Australian rabbit plague footage that's being shown, but maybe they've tricked me. Regardless, from there the film moves on to telling a story that is unquestionably fictional and something of a throwback to the giant creature films of the 1950s.
Written by Don Holliday and Gene R. Kearney, based on a novel by Russell Braddon (a novel titled The Year of the Angry Rabbit), Night of the Lepus stars Stuart Whitman and Janet Leigh as Roy and Gerry Bennett, married researchers who have been trying to find a way to control insect populations without the use of poison. That approach appeals to Arizona rancher Cole Hillman (Rory Calhoun), whose property has been overrun with rabbits since he wiped out the coyotes that had been causing him trouble. He understands that there needs to be a balance in nature; he doesn't want to kill all the rabbits, he just wants to have a lot less of them. So the Bennetts are convinced to set insects aside for a while and figure out this rabbit issue. Their idea is to try to use hormones to interrupt the rabbits' breeding cycle.
The Bennetts are responsible and try out their hormone experiment in a lab, but one of the rabbits they have injected with their hormone serum is accidentally released into the wild by their young daughter... and soon the characters realize that their serum has a shocking side effect. It causes the rabbits to grow to a massive size. Soon enough - just 20 minutes into the film's 88 minute running time - an army of giant rabbits has started bouncing through the countryside, destroying property and mauling people to death. Now lethal force is necessary to deal with these things, because they're huge and vicious.
Unlike rabbits, Night of the Lepus doesn't have a very good reputation, and was even considered goofball enough to be mocked on Mystery Science Theater 3000. I think it's pretty entertaining even without the addition of MST3K jokes, though. The spectacle of giant rabbits bouncing through scenes and attacking people is fun, and Claxton and the screenwriters made the best possible movie they could have out of the subject matter - this is a lot better than I would have expected a giant rabbit movie to be. I haven't read the source material, but I've heard that Braddon's novel was comedic, which makes sense. Who could take the idea of giant rabbits seriously? Well, Night of the Lepus does, and it works for me.
I first saw Night of the Lepus on TV when I was a little kid, and the images of giant rabbits stuck with me for decades. When I finally watched the movie again as part of an Easter celebration, I was pleased to find that those images are in a movie that I find quite enjoyable.
DeForest Kelley plays a role in this film, and five years later his Star Trek co-star William Shatner got in on the "nature run amok in Arizona" action with the film Kingdom of the Spiders. Night of the Lepus and Kingdom of the Spiders would make for a great double feature.
BLACKBELT (1992)
The term "mockbuster" didn't exist in 1992, but if it did I think Blackbelt would have been called a mockbuster of The Bodyguard. It seems like too much of a coincidence that this movie about a bodyguard being hired to protect a singer from an obsessed fan would come out the same year as that bigger movie about the same thing. Sure, Blackbelt beat The Bodyguard to release by six months, but it started filming six months after it was announced that Kevin Costner and Whitney Houston were making The Bodyguard, and six months is plenty of time for a low budget action movie like this to get tossed together. Plus it executive produced by Roger Corman, the same man who beat Jurassic Park to the market with his dinosaur movie Carnosaur.
Written and directed by Charles Philip Moore from a story by Paul Maslak, Neva Friedenn, and David S. Green (a.k.a. Robert Easter), Blackbelt stars Don "The Dragon" Wilson as cop-turned-bodyguard Jack Dillon, and you know this is going to be a good movie right away because the credits of several of the actors are accompanied by their martial arts competition rankings. This one features three kickboxing champions and seven karate champions, which is almost enough to earn "instant classic" status right there.
The villain is Matthias Hues of I Come in Peace as John Sweet, a mercenary we see checking into a hotel with a prostitute, then leaving their room for a minute before getting to business so he can go over to a different room in the same hotel to beat an arms dealer and several of his associates to death with his bare hands. Once he's done with the prostitute (and kills her), Sweet goes to a club where singer Shanna (Deirdre Imershein) is performing - and we see that he's obsessed with Shanna because she gives him flashbacks to his mother, who used to treat him like "mommy's little husband". When Sweet sends Shanna a gift of a severed human finger, she seeks out the help of Jack Dillon.
Of course, Moore didn't just give "The Dragon" one person to fight in this movie. Shanna is backed by mobster Eddie Deangelo (Richard Beymer), and when her career decisions threaten to cause Deangelo to lose millions of dollars, he decides its time to have her killed. And he doesn't just hire one hitman, he sends a whole team out into the field. So Dillon has to take down a bunch of mob-hired assassins in addition to the serial killer mercenary stalker, who also has some fellow mercenaries around to help him out.
To make the Bodyguard mockbusting more obvious, Dillon and Shanna do indeed fall for each other when he's not busy killing bad guys for her. It's just a shame that her song "Love Rocket" didn't get as much play as the songs Houston recorded for The Bodyguard.
If you can get into dirt cheap direct-to-video action thrillers from the early '90s, Blackbelt is a pretty good one.
THE HUNT (2020)
Originally scheduled for a theatrical release in September of 2019, the Blumhouse production The Hunt was pulled off Universal's release schedule when the United States was struck by a series of mass shootings. The delay was understandable, since the film is a twist on The Most Dangerous Game at its core; it is about people hunting other people, and many of the characters who die in the film are shot. The Hunt did finally reach theatres on March 13th, 2020... pretty much the worst possible time for a movie to get released, coming right before theatres were closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. But because of that timing, The Hunt has been (along with The Invisible Man) one of the only movies still making money at the U.S. box office, since it's showing at a handful of drive-ins around the country. It was also given an early VOD release, like several movies that came out shortly before the pandemic hit the states.
While The Hunt is a violent film that turns bloody deaths into a joke, it's not a particularly dark film, and it's not a mindless exercise in brutality. What director Craig Zobel and screenwriters Nick Cuse and (co-creator of Lost) Damon Lindelof have done here is put together an amusing satire that skewers both extreme ends of the American political spectrum. The story begins with a group of wealthy liberals having a group text conversation and cracking jokes about "hunting deplorables" at a manor in Vermont. When those texts leak to the public, some people actually believe that these liberals hunt conservatives for fun, so their careers are destroyed. Then they decide to find the conservatives who were most vocal about "ManorGate" online and actually hunt them. Nearly every character in the film represents the worst the left and right have to offer, and the only one the viewer is really meant to connect with is Crystal (Betty Gilpin), someone who was put into the hunt by accident (mistaken identity) and doesn't seem political. She's just trying to survive. She's also a war veteran who's very capable under fire, and she's a bit unbalanced, so the people who assembled this hunt have no idea what they've gotten themselves into by dragging her into this.
The Hunt also stars Hilary Swank, Ike Barinholtz, Ethan Suplee, Emma Roberts, Amy Madigan, Macon Blair, and Justin Hartley, among others, and repeatedly took me by surprise with the way it handled its characters.
Viewers on the left and right who are able to have a sense of humor about their politics might be equally entertained by this one and enjoy watching the film make a mockery of both sides. But viewers who see themselves directly reflected in any of the characters might hate it.
Either way, the climactic fight between Gilpin and Swank's characters is pretty impressive.
POINT BLANK (2019)
A Netflix production that reached the streaming service in the summer of 2019, Point Blank is the third time this particular story has been told. The story originated as a 2010 French film called À Bout Portant (which means Point Blank), then there was a Korean remake called Pyojeok (a.k.a. The Target) in 2014, and then this one. This Point Blank was the first one of the bunch to catch my attention, because it's directed by Joe Lynch (Wrong Turn 2, Chillerama, Knights of Badassdom, Everly, Mayhem) and produced by Joe Carnahan (Smokin' Aces, The Grey). Plus it stars Anthony Mackie and Frank Grillo. I'm a fan of all these people, and the movie was filmed in Ohio, so I had to watch it.
This Point Blank begins with Abe Guevara (Grillo) running away from a house belonging to the Assistant District Attorney, who is dead in his home office. Abe has been shot in the stomach, and before he can reach the getaway vehicle his brother Mateo (Christian Cooke) is sitting in, he gets hit by a car. An unconscious Abe is hospitalized with a concussion and cracked ribs, in addition to that bullet wound. The nurse caring for him is Paul Booker (Mackie) whose pregnant wife Taryn (Teyonah Parris) is due to give birth in three weeks.
Desperate to get Abe out of the hospital, where he's being guarded by the police, Mateo abducts Taryn to force Paul to bring him his brother. To save his wife and unborn child, Paul follows Mateo's orders, even though it requires knocking out a police officer with a defibrillator. He wakes Abe up, keeps him pumped full of pain meds, and gets him out of the hospital. Unfortunately, the Abe/Taryn exchange is not simple, and Abe and Paul end up on the run together, with police officer Regina Lewis (Marcia Gay Harden) determined to catch up with them.
There are twists and turns, and we find out that bad characters may not be as bad as they seem to be and characters we thought were good were just putting on a front. Scripted by Adam G. Simon, the story moves along at a quick pace and the movie features a good amount of fights, gunfire, and chases, which Lynch often sets to some cool soundtrack choices. The music in the film includes songs by Black Flag, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, Kid 'n Play, Dead Kennedys, Oran "Juice" Jones, Eazy-E, ABC, Brutus, Atlantic Starr, Little Bessie, Sigue Sigue Sputnik, and Whitesnake.
Point Blank is a fun 86 minutes. A week after the release of this one, a fourth version of the story was released in India - a film called Kadaram Kondan, a.k.a. Mr. KK. Filmmakers, production companies, and studios have really latched on to this simple action movie set-up of a hospital worker being forced to go on the run with a criminal.
A Netflix production that reached the streaming service in the summer of 2019, Point Blank is the third time this particular story has been told. The story originated as a 2010 French film called À Bout Portant (which means Point Blank), then there was a Korean remake called Pyojeok (a.k.a. The Target) in 2014, and then this one. This Point Blank was the first one of the bunch to catch my attention, because it's directed by Joe Lynch (Wrong Turn 2, Chillerama, Knights of Badassdom, Everly, Mayhem) and produced by Joe Carnahan (Smokin' Aces, The Grey). Plus it stars Anthony Mackie and Frank Grillo. I'm a fan of all these people, and the movie was filmed in Ohio, so I had to watch it.
This Point Blank begins with Abe Guevara (Grillo) running away from a house belonging to the Assistant District Attorney, who is dead in his home office. Abe has been shot in the stomach, and before he can reach the getaway vehicle his brother Mateo (Christian Cooke) is sitting in, he gets hit by a car. An unconscious Abe is hospitalized with a concussion and cracked ribs, in addition to that bullet wound. The nurse caring for him is Paul Booker (Mackie) whose pregnant wife Taryn (Teyonah Parris) is due to give birth in three weeks.
Desperate to get Abe out of the hospital, where he's being guarded by the police, Mateo abducts Taryn to force Paul to bring him his brother. To save his wife and unborn child, Paul follows Mateo's orders, even though it requires knocking out a police officer with a defibrillator. He wakes Abe up, keeps him pumped full of pain meds, and gets him out of the hospital. Unfortunately, the Abe/Taryn exchange is not simple, and Abe and Paul end up on the run together, with police officer Regina Lewis (Marcia Gay Harden) determined to catch up with them.
There are twists and turns, and we find out that bad characters may not be as bad as they seem to be and characters we thought were good were just putting on a front. Scripted by Adam G. Simon, the story moves along at a quick pace and the movie features a good amount of fights, gunfire, and chases, which Lynch often sets to some cool soundtrack choices. The music in the film includes songs by Black Flag, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, Kid 'n Play, Dead Kennedys, Oran "Juice" Jones, Eazy-E, ABC, Brutus, Atlantic Starr, Little Bessie, Sigue Sigue Sputnik, and Whitesnake.
Point Blank is a fun 86 minutes. A week after the release of this one, a fourth version of the story was released in India - a film called Kadaram Kondan, a.k.a. Mr. KK. Filmmakers, production companies, and studios have really latched on to this simple action movie set-up of a hospital worker being forced to go on the run with a criminal.
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