By Edward Staiger
FROGS (1972)
Directed by George McCowan
Starring Ray Milland, Sam Elliott, Joan Van Ark
THE NIGHT OF THE LEPUS (1972)
Directed by William F. Claxton
Starring Janet Leigh, Stuart Whitman, Rory Calhoun, DeForest Kelley
By 1972 the pre-Jaws, pre-Spielberg “creature features” community had exhausted outer space and all the animals then guest-starring on Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom as source material to threaten humankind. What could they come up with next? Another 50-foot Woman? As if combing the scalp of the cosmos, they scraped together what became Frogs and The Night of the Lepus - that is, bottom-of-the-barrel reptiles, mutant bunny rabbits and the usual roster of Hollywood has-beens.
Oozing atmosphere, acted with relish, and actually filmed in the swamplands of Florida, Frogs almost works. It gets an A for atmosphere, but alas, also an A for absurdity. Ray Milland, whose stardom and Oscar for Best Actor in The Lost Weekend (1945) must have by that time seemed to him like a lost lifetime ago, was cast as wealthy wheelchair-bound Jason Crockett, owner and proprietor of Crockett Island, whose “pesticides” and “poisons” are annoying the hell out of the local reptiles and Sam Elliott. The young Sam Elliott portrays photojournalist Pickett Smith who means to do an expose but is hoodwinked into attending Crockett’s annual birthday bash and is thereby hooked by Crockett’s daughter, Karen (TV’s Knots Landing’s Joan Van Ark).
Heavy on the relish, Milland barks his way through the festivities as, one by one, frogs mount on the patio, bleeping and splattering themselves against windows and doors (apparently, frogs are glass-blind) and family members go sauntering off into the infested estate - Aunt hunts butterflies, Uncle hunts aunt, reptiles hunt relatives. The director, George McCowan (lots of TV credits) seems to single out the snakes - Crockett Island is like a Noah’s Ark with one, not two, of every species present, all poised and posed (including one dangling from the dining room chandelier) as if awaiting Elliott to shoot them for a spread in National Geographic.
Something else to reckon with: writer Robert Hutchison’s insistence on being inspired by playwright Tennessee Williams. The deep South, the family gathering, an outspoken “Big Daddy,” an alcoholic ex-athlete of a son who’s unhappily married…. Say what you will, but this is Frogs on a Hot Tin Roof. Once all that exposition is out of the way, the son is free to be done in rather unceremoniously by a water snake, and shortly thereafter, the Liz Taylor stand-in avoids the lizards but falls to the turtles (disappointingly and anticlimactically off-camera). Far more fetching is brother Kenneth in the greenhouse who’s asphyxiated by lizards. Asphyxiated by lizards? Yes, those clumsy scene-stealers manage to knock over giant jars of poison, conveniently labelled POISON (any brand will do), and he succumbs to this noxious mix of fumes and scampering appendages.
Meanwhile back at the ranch in Arizona, an independent production company, A.C. Lyles Productions, is concocting The Night of the Lepus (to be distributed by MGM). That Lepus can be considered the worst film the affectionately-remembered Janet Leigh (Psycho, Touch of Evil) ever made comes as no surprise to anyone. That Lepus can also be considered the worst film B-movie survivors Stuart Whitman and Rory Calhoun ever made is like a shock to the nervous system. How bad can it be?
We’re immediately thrust into the thick of things. A (priceless) televised “Special Report” informs us that rabbit immigration in the “pastoral lands of Australia” has become a menace, a “plague,” and that “rabbit round-ups” have become a commonplace necessity in the American southwest as well. The cattle are lowing, horses twitching, there are men with rifles, there are men with rifles in packs who mean to shoot, and married scientists Roy and Gerry Bennett, played by Stuart Whitman and Janet Leigh, are being described as a “young couple” (even in long ago 1972, that was a stretch).
Though the no-nonsense Gerry informs the university expert Elgin Clark (a deadpan DeForest Kelley from TV’s Star Trek) enlisting their aid that “rabbits aren’t exactly Roy’s bag,” Roy consumed with tape-recording the utterances of bats and insects; nevertheless, before the desert dust settles on Elgin’s request, Gerry’s seen stuffing live rabbits into metal garbage cans and creating “control groups” because Roy’s already developed a hormone treatment to curb that infamous rabbit reproduction. As Gerry patiently explains to their precocious daughter Amanda, “We want to make Jack more like Jill, and Jill more like Jack.” To which Amanda, suddenly hot on rabbits, replies, “Can’t I have one - before you kill them?”
Not to be deferred, Amanda snatches a tampered rabbit from a cage, and the rest is B-movie history. In the most remarkably fast mutation transformation imaginable (what was in those injections?), rabbits the size of Volkswagon “Bugs” have cornered Amanda in a cave where she’s left traumatized by the sight of grossly-enlarged bloody bunny lips. And they’re (very) long in the tooth as well. This is only the beginning. What’s clearly a man in a rabbit suit mauls a victim, but the man’s stature is so upright, he looks more like a killer kangaroo. Special effects aren’t exactly The Night of the Lepus’s bag. To emphasize the weight and size of these modified mutants, the director William F. Claxton (lots of TV credits) films them in slow motion in merciless magnification. Always in flight and seemingly burdened by their own new-found excesses, they just lumber and lumber along. Claxton also films them from underneath so the viewer is subjected to looming, leaping overhead rabbit bellies.
Another “trick” becomes unintentionally charming, somewhat Disneyesque. The rabbits are placed in miniature models of their real-life counterparts - we see them thudding across an itty-bitty country bridge, and more impressively, after killing its owner, they possess the neighbourhood grocery store and really chow down. That dollhouse mini-mart may be where Barbie and Ken go shopping.
There’s also a climactic cattle stampede. Utilizing footage from God-knows-what western, rabbits are pitted against hordes of rampaging cattle (but never in the same frame), and boy those bulls are running for their lives! All this leads the National Guard to occupy the nearby drive-in movie theatre (!) currently showing MGM’s Every Little Crook and Nanny (another flop). “Attention ladies and gentlemen! There’s a herd of killer rabbits headed this way! Please follow instructions! Roll up your windows and keep calm!” (You really can’t believe your ears.) Presumably the cattle are all living comfortably in Mexico because they’re never referred to again, but following instructions, the drive-in patrons’ vehicles help form a blockade - the beginning of the end for Bennett’s bunnies.
As in most low-budget films, the actors aren’t looking their best. The male leads look as frowsy as the rabbits with their 70s redneck I-ain’t-niver-gettin-me-a-haircut-fer-nobody look. And Janet Leigh, in “authentic” Arizona threads seems bent on entering the local saloon while her bubble white-blonde bob should have set her sights on the local salon. Upon release, to nobody’s surprise, The Night of the Lepus wasn’t exactly anybody’s bag.
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