Night of the Lepus

Night of the Lepus was shot on location at Old Tucson Studios in Arizona, a short three hour drive from Los Angeles. The facility was a legendary site for the makers of Westerns. Established in 1939 by Columbia Pictures for use on the film Arizona, it has since been home to literally hundreds of films, including four by John Wayne. It is now also a tourist attraction, and was recently voted "Best Western Movie Set" by True West Magazine. Such trappings helped stars like Rory Calhoun feel at home. He admitted, "It's my first science-fiction film in over 70 some odd total. But I play a rancher who has the problem of rabbit over-population and I'm back at home on a horse again." In the pressbook promotion for Night of the Lepus, Janet Leigh revealed one of her reasons for doing the movie. "The days when I could flit off to Europe to do a movie are over," she says. "The Night of the Lepus location in Tucson is only an hour from home by air. I was able to go home on the weekends, or the family came to me. I have turned down many a Broadway play because I think it is important to be with the girls while they are growing up, and Bob's [her husband, Robert Brandt] home base is in California. One makes sacrifices, of course, but they are happy ones." Leigh, in an interview with Tom Weaver for his book Science Fiction Stars and Horror Heroes, said, regarding Night of the Lepus, "What no one realized was that, no matter what you do, a bunny rabbit is a bunny rabbit. A rat, that can be menacing - so can a frog. Spiders or scorpions or alligators - they could all work in that situation, and they have. But - a bunny rabbit? How can you make a bunny rabbit menacing, what can you do? It just didn't work." Leigh also admitted that for some scenes "there was somebody they put a bunny suit on, to achieve some of the effects - I've forgotten as much as I could about that picture." Someone in MGM's publicity department realized that rabbits are not generally considered menacing, and that the film they were making had ahead of it a significant hurdle in convincing audiences otherwise. So, the role of rabbits was effaced. The title was changed from Rabbits to Night of the Lepus, with a certain confidence that few in the target audience would cotton on to the Latin name for the little beasties. The posters were drawn up with nary a bunny in sight, just eyes in the night and a vague reference to "creatures." Even the trailer managed to avoid showing the critters on screen. Most press releases merely mentioned "mutants," neatly leaving off what sort of mutant they meant. Only the credit at the bottom of the poster, acknowledging Russell Braddon's book The Year of the Angry Rabbit as a source, gave the game away. Not everyone got the memo, though. Just as one arm of the publicity unit strove to conceal the monster hares from the public, another went gaga sending out souvenir buttons and trinkets adorned with a rabbit's foot motif. So much for keeping it secret. The rabbits used onscreen didn't help the cause, either. The real-life southwest is indeed plagued by wild rabbits, a gnarly breed of lagomorph that looks completely unlike the cuddly house pets that the filmmakers unwisely used for the effects scenes. The real thing might have looked a little menacing, in the right circumstance, but these fat friendly furballs do not. Some of the grizzly items included in MGM's "Ever-Ready, All Purpose, Go Get 'Em Fright Kit" for theatre distributors showing Night of the Lepus included: A) 100 Lepus foot necklaces dipped in blood that can be used for radio or TV contests as well as advance give-a-ways to newspaper editors, radio and TV personalities. B) 500 hi-camp, pop art Lepus foot buttons. A "must give" to discotheques, teeny bops, college kids and wacked-out theatre patrons. C) Two eye-catching Lepus sidewalk stencils. Let everyone know the LEPUS ARE COMING! D) 500 Lepus foot stickers. by David Kalat Sources: Russell Braddon, The Year of the Angry Rabbit, William Heinemann Ltd., 1964. Tom Weaver, Interview with Janet Leigh, Return of the B Science Fiction and Horror Heroes, McFarland Press, 2000. Night of the Lepus press kit, MGM, 1972. Night of the Lepus publicity kit, MGM, 1972.

Few films are as mocked as the 1972 schlockfest Night of the Lepus. One need only mention the premise (attack of the giant bunnies!) and the derision sets in on its own. It's a wonder the whole genre of horror didn't just curl up and die in embarrassment. Legions of film critics, genre fans, and innocent bystanders have set up their tents in the let's-make-fun-of-the-dumb-bunny-monsters camp, sharing the assumption that it was the choice of menace that doomed this exercise. How could killer rabbits ever be scary? But if it is self-evidently obvious that rabbits make for a poor choice of monster, how could this be? What would motivate a motion-picture institution run by responsible adults to invest in a thing like this? What were they thinking? For the majority of Americans, rabbits exist only as cuddly pets. It is hard for many of us to envision the cute widdle wabbits as pests, but that is indeed what they are. Consider the case of Australia, where rabbits were introduced in the mid-19th century by a British officer as a lark. He thought they were fun to look at, and a joy to shoot, so he imported a mere twenty four wild rabbits and let them loose. Within ten years, the offshoots of those original 24 numbered in the millions. And they destroyed the environment. The rabbit scourge exterminated one out of every eight mammalian species on the continent, and left untold devastation to the farmlands. It was nothing short of a natural apocalypse. In desperation, the Australian government in the 1950s introduced myxomatosis and other viral plagues to curb the rabbit population. This was initially successful, but natural selection created myxomatosis-proof rabbits that survived the disease... which brings us to the world of science-fiction. In 1964, Australian satirist Russell Braddon wrote a wickedly funny work of speculative fantasy about the continued efforts of the Australian authorities to bio-engineer a more effective strain of myxomatosis to combat the rabbit's growing natural resistance. In the book, the new Super-Myx fails to kill the pests, but only makes them savage and carnivorous. However, it turns out that Super-Myx is fatal to humans, and so the power-mad Aussie Prime Minister seizes on the properties of his new biological weapon to conquer the world and establish a fascist Australian empire. As he builds his totalitarian state, the infected rabbits mutate into increasingly deadly monsters that ultimately bring his reign of terror to an end-and wipe out all human civilization to boot. The Year of the Angry Rabbit is a riotous novel, a sort of literary Dr. Strangelove (1964) for the age of Rachel Carson. The killer rabbits figure only in a small part of the story, which reads more like a history of Nazi Germany as told by Oscar Wilde. A decade later found Hollywood rapidly overrun by monster animals and Nature-vs-Man parables. And so it came to pass that producer A.C. Lyles would oversee a filmic adaptation of Braddon's novel. It was an anomaly, an aberration. Lyles had never done sci-fi before, and would never again. Lyles made his name manufacturing small-scale Westerns of an old-fashioned stripe, the sort of homespun oater that the followers of Sergio Leone destroyed. He trudged on regardless (although his recent work on Deadwood shows that Lyle could, if sufficiently prodded, move with the times). He assembled a team of fellow Westerners to write and star in this monster flick, which would be shot at Old Tucson, the location favored by so many period Westerns. Night of the Lepus was horror in name only-it looked, walked, and quacked like an old-school Western. Lyle's screenwriters Gene R. Kearney and Don Holliday threw out everything that made the book witty, clever, original, and entertaining. All that was left was killer rabbits. In Braddon's story, the rabbits were not just violent and bloodthirsty; they were also plague-carriers. In omitting that viral aspect, the movie would be obliged to depict its bunnies as physically threatening. This would be difficult in the best of circumstances, but the effects crew (Escape from the Planet of the Apes' [1971] Howard A. Anderson Company) proved themselves incapable of the task. Night of the Lepus was Don Holliday's only screenplay credit; he also edited the 1944 Disney animated short The Three Caballeros (1944). Gene R. Kearney, on the other hand, had many screenplay credits to his name, including the intriguing 1967 Curtis Harrington thriller Games, modeled on the French film classic Diabolique (1955), and TV series episodes for Night Gallery, Lou Grant and Kojak. The script paid a brief homage to its source in an opening sequence set in Australia, but few readers of Braddon's book would recognize Night of the Lepus as being at all connected. It would be as if a filmmaker set out to make a movie of The Bible but chose to use only the genealogical "begat" sequences from Genesis and skipped everything else. When asked how she could have agreed to participate in such a debacle, Janet Leigh explained that the screenplay read well and that, on the page, Lepus seemed to fall happily in line with other horror flicks like Willard (1971) and Frogs (1972). "No one twisted my arm and said I had to do it," she said, "It didn't dawn on anyone until-it took about four or five days before we realized we didn't have the ideal director." Leigh has been terrorized more effectively on the screen in such landmark films as Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) and the Fred Zinnemann film noir thriller Act of Violence (1948). She was also threatened by murderer Robert Ryan in The Naked Spur (1953), stripped and humiliated by Mexican thugs led by Mercedes McCambridge in Touch of Evil (1958) and tangentially involved in a political assassination plot in John Frankenheimer's chilling The Manchurian Candidate (1962). After Night of the Lepus, Leigh attempted one more horror film, John Carpenter's The Fog (1980), co-starring her daughter Jamie Lee Curtis. It was a much more positive experience. Making rabbits threatening is a significant challenge, but not an entirely insurmountable one in the right hands. Plenty of movies have managed to create menaces out of seemingly innocuous things: babies and children are rendered scary in the likes of Village of the Damned (1960), The Exorcist (1973), and The Omen (1976). When Alfred Hitchcock crafted The Birds (1963), he selected ordinary wrens and seagulls as his monsters, not more realistically dangerous birds of prey. The makers of Long Weekend (1978) have as their primary screen threat a manatee-one of Nature's most docile of animals-and not just any manatee, but a dead one. You can't get much more unthreatening than that-unless maybe you're making The Monolith Monsters (1957), about killer rocks. Inanimate, immobile rocks. Or Charisma (1976), about a killer tree. Again, it doesn't even move. These are all effective works of suspense, classics in their own right. What makes these other movies so powerful, though, is the careful creation of a suspenseful atmosphere, and the ratcheting up of drama between the human characters. Babies and rocks and trees are not in themselves scary, but careful filmmaking can make them seem so. In Night of the Lepus, the mutation appears to ripple through the wild rabbit population almost overnight, even before the effects of the experimental serum make themselves evident in the lab. This is one of several implausibilities in the movie such as real rabbits have no vocal chords. So even an army of giant mutant rabbits would make almost no sound. The filmmakers dub in a strange warbling sound regardless. William F. Claxton, the director assigned to Night of the Lepus, was mainly known for his Westerns, some of them for Mr. Lyles, and all of them the kind of thing where simply having a cowboy on a horse passed for sufficient entertainment to an undemanding audience. In place of a spooky atmosphere, he sets Night of the Lepus in the sunny expanses of an Arizona desert, populated by cowboys and gold mines and other refugees from old-school horse operas. Claxton never even bothers with any of the cinematic tricks that could artificially manufacture an ominous mood out of thin air-canted camera angles, dark shadows, eerie music... he seems confident that the rabbits will all by themselves do the job. Other films that Claxton has directed include the juvenile delinquent drama Young and Dangerous (1957) starring Mark Damon, Rockabilly Baby (1957), the soap opera Desire in the Dust (1960) with Raymond Burr, Martha Hyer and Joan Bennett, and the religious drama I'll Give My Life (1960) starring Ray Collins and Angie Dickinson. He has also helmed many episodes for such TV series as Yancy Derringer, The Twilight Zone, Gunsmoke, Little House on the Prairie and Bonanza. He died in 1996. Rory Calhoun was then best known as the star, producer, director, and writer of The Texan, one of the numerous Western TV series that clogged the airwaves in the mid-20th century. Another such program was The Rifleman, former home of actor Paul Fix. DeForest Kelley had guest-starred on Bonanza, Gunsmoke, and just about any other Western series you care to mention. Of course, he is now best remembered for his role as the chief physician on the Starship Enterprise. In a curious coincidence, his role had originally been filled by Paul Fix in the pilot episode of Star Trek. Scenes in which Kelley and Fix play alongside each other give some sci-fi buffs one of the few moments of pleasure to be found in the dreary Night of the Lepus. by David Kalat Sources: Russell Braddon, The Year of the Angry Rabbit, William Heinemann Ltd., 1964. Tom Weaver, Interview with Janet Leigh, Return of the B Science Fiction and Horror Heroes, McFarland Press, 2000. Night of the Lepus press kit, MGM, 1972. Night of the Lepus publicity kit, MGM, 1972.

"The filmic equivalent of rabbit pellets." ~Slant Magazine "Not as hare-y as you think, it just breeds contempt." ~John Stanley, Creature Features Strikes Again Movie Guide "Who would agree to appear in such an absurd film? Stuart Whitman, Janet Leigh, Rory Calhoun, DeForest Kelley, and Paul Fix, that's who." ~Michael Weldon, The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film "Stuart Whitman, Janet Leigh, and Rory Calhoun are given no characterizations to enact other than to be normal, everyday people caught up in a crisis, and they react credibly and register pleasantly." ~Kevin Thomas, LA Times "...dull and predictable...at least it's not being released at Easter." - William Wolf, Cue "The basic plot line of Night of the Lepus had the makings of a superior, timely thought-provoking sci-fi exploitationer; however, inept dialog and worse direction reduce the A.C. Lyles production to a shambles." ~Murf, Variety "One of the crown jewels of crap cinema. Had they played it more for laughs, had they not been so bloody serious about the whole thing, had they-now here's a radical concept-had they just adapted the damn book instead of going off in this strange, absurd direction..." ~Judge Maurice Cobbs, DVD Verdict "Inept scripting, a poorly disguised political agenda, and a ridiculous creature concept all make Night of the Lepus an excruciatingly long 88 minutes, barely redeemed by several moments of stupidity-induced laughter. If you choose to take on this movie, my advice is a bottle of vodka and your best Mystery Science Theater 3000 snarking crew." ~Julie Merriam, Classic Horror "There are a number of ways to sink your horror movie, right from the start. You could cast DeForest Kelley in it. Or you could star Janet Leigh (post-Psycho, 1960) as a genetic scientist. But perhaps the best way...if the least well-known...is to include the word "lepus" in it...To call Lepus a bad horror film is an insult to the legacy of Ed Wood. At least Wood was trying." - Christopher Null, filmcritic.com Compiled by David Kalat

GERRY (Janet Leigh): Our daughter expresses a precocious interest in zoology and all you can say is shhh! AMANDA (Melanie Fullerton): I like rabbits, mommy! GERRY: We were trying to make Jack a little more like Jill, and Jill a little more like Jack, so they wouldn't keep having such large families. SHERIFF (Paul Fix): What have we got here, vampires? DR. LEOPOLD (William Elliott): Possibly. But frankly, Sheriff, off the top of my head, the only thing that could have caused this sort of destruction-a saber tooth tiger. As a matter of fact, a lot of them. WOMAN: Are you sure we shouldn't stop? MAN: We're picking up no strangers. I said that back in Denver and I'm sticking with it. Especially a man carrying a gun. OFFICER (Phillip Avenetti): Attention! Ladies and gentlemen, attention! There is a herd of killer rabbits headed this way and we desperately need your help! Compiled by David Kalat

Rancher Cole Hillman (Rory Calhoun) is overrun by pesky rabbits, but the man has enough ecological awareness not to indiscriminately spray poison. Looking for a more Nature-friendly alternative to his dilemma, he turns to scientists Roy and Gerry Bennett (Stuart Whitman and Janet Leigh). Specialists in conceiving alternative approaches to pest control, the couple bring their expertise to bear on the rabbit question. What if they could interfere with the rabbits' breeding, either to halt it altogether or to produce birth defects that kill off the next generation? No sooner have the Bennetts injected a rabbit with an experimental serum than their disobedient daughter Amanda secretly takes the thing as a pet, only to accidentally lose it almost immediately. The infected bunny carries its mutagen into the wild population, producing a plague of oversized, vicious critters with a taste for human flesh. Of course, the monsters breed like rabbits, which means the problem is going to get really bad really fast, while the humans scrabble to think of a way out to end the night of the lepus. The early 1970s was a ripe time for ecologically-aware horror. Rachel Carson's landmark 1962 study of the effects of DDT pesticides had been a wake-up call for American society. The attitude that scientific progress and good old American know-how would inevitably conquer all problems started to crumble. For people living in the shadow of the Bomb, a cynicism towards science was already seeping in, but by the 1970s that cynicism would spill over. Exploitation movies, living up to their name, exploited these new fears. The monsters we faced were of our own creation-Mother Nature doesn't like to be fooled. For being so much of its time in that respect, though, Night of the Lepus (1972) is a throwback. It seems desperately to want to be the next Them! (1954), not the next The Birds (1963). Nods to Them! abound: a little girl is rendered insensate by the sight of overgrown animals, the police discover inexplicable wreckage and irrational murders, the menace is halted by the military using the most prosaic of methods. Even the film's depiction of the military is a throwback; instead of the ambiguous, or openly hostile, attitude towards soldiers common to films of the 1970s, Night of the Lepus never questions whether sending armed men in with guns and flame-throwers is an appropriate solution to the problem at hand. Actually seeing the movie is a let-down. Instead of self-consciously campy cheese a la Beware! The Blob (1972) or Mars Needs Women (1967), Night of the Lepus takes itself seriously. The cast play it straight, evidently laboring under the assumption that they're in a real movie. Stuart Whitman makes for the least charismatic scientist hero in sci-fi movie history. The man was a decorated All-American actor with a fat resume of Western roles, but this was not his finest hour. As his wife, Janet Leigh is saddled with a role pocked with a casual sexism that was quite out of place in 1970s cinema (another throwback attitude). This is the scream queen from Psycho (1960), from The Manchurian Candidate (1962), from Touch of Evil (1958). Give her the right role and she could have carried the movie alone, but like Whitman her talents were simply squandered. DeForest Kelley, ex-Star Trekker, was known for bringing warmth and humanity to his roles. As Elgin Clark, he is saddled with an underwritten part that gives him nothing memorable to do or say. And let's not forget Rory Calhoun, so admired by The Simpsons' Mr. Burns for his ability to stand and walk. Here he plays a rancher trying to avoid using poison-as are we, trapped in the audience. These talented thespians were hired to act alongside a plague of stock footage, hordes of pet bunnies hopping in slow-motion across miniature sets, and every once in a while to suffer the attacks of a stuntman in a rabbit suit. Donnie Darko (2001) made a man in a rabbit costume nightmarishly scary; this is more along the lines of a dad wearing an Easter Bunny suit at a neighborhood egg hunt, but with fake blood. Little girl Amanda stands in for the audience's point of view, voicing the very objections the average viewer might be thinking-such as that bunnies are cute, not frightening. Giving this position to a character in the film might have been a smart move, except that it was put in the mouth of a child who acts like a brain-injury victim. Perhaps Melanie Fullerton was simply too old for the role as written and nobody bothered to fix it, but the obviously ten-year-old (or even older) girl behaves like a toddler. The actress occasionally looks blankly into the camera lens from the background of scenes focusing on other characters, as if looking for permission to leave. Meanwhile, her adult costars deliver sullen performances, exuding resentment for being stuck in such a turkey. While the film suffers from over-earnestness, the publicity team at MGM seemed to think they had a camp classic on their hands. They sent out to theaters a "Go Get 'Em Fright Kit" which included, among other oddities, hundreds of "hi-camp, pop art Lepus foot buttons," to quote from the promotional literature. These were to be distributed to "discotheques, teeny bops, college kids, and wacked-out theatre patrons" (sic, sic, and sic!) The kits also provided "ghastly posters" with which to "glut every available foot of wall space" at "campuses, record stores, discotheques, psychedelic clothing stores and shopping centers." Although the trailer promised to be "the most stupefying, wacked-out glimpse of horror," the ringer in the Fright Kit is clearly the attempt to get Top 40 radio stations to play a record containing no music, just five minutes (five minutes!!!) of the warbly Lepus sound effect. If only the filmmakers had shown half the creativity and awareness of the audience as the publicity department, the film might have been worth the bally-hoo. Years later, Janet Leigh summed it up to film historian Tom Weaver: "I've forgotten as much as I could about that picture." Producer: A. C. Lyles Director: William F. Claxton Screenwriters: Don Holliday and Gene R. Kearney from the book "The Year of the Angry Rabbit" by Russell Braddon Art Direction: Stan Jolley Cinematography: Ted Voightlander Film Editing: John McSweeney Original Music: Jimmie Haskell Cast: Stuart Whitman (Roy Bennett), Janet Leigh (Gerry Bennett), Rory Calhoun (Cole Hillman), DeForest Kelley (Elgin Clark), Paul Fix (Sheriff Cody), Melanie Fullerton (Amanda Bennett). C-88m. by David Kalat

One could argue that the true auteur of the seminal enviro-cautionary film Night of the Lepus (1972) was not director William F. Claxton, but instead producer A. C. Lyles, who saw the powerful potential in melding the Ecology-obsessed zeitgeist that existed in America in the early 1970s with his own filmic sense of raw desert nature; the mis en scene that infuses such genre classics as Arizona Bushwhackers (1968) and...Nah, I'm just kidding. Night of the Lepus is about giant bunny rabbits, and it easily qualifies as one of the silliest movies ever released by a major studio. It has the look and feel of an independent production, which it essentially is though it arrived with the full backing and distribution of no less than Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer; in fact it is complete with plugs (a Drive-In theatre marquee in the film features the 1972 MGM release Every Little Crook and Nanny) and corporate synergy (a Tom & Jerry cartoon is playing at the Drive-In). So, here is the plot that, incredibly, looked viable to a bunch of movie executives sitting around a table at some point: Following an awkward faux-newscast prologue which outlines the dangers of unchecked rabbit-breeding in Australia, we meet bat researchers Roy Bennett (Stuart Whitman) and his wife Gerry (Janet Leigh). Cattle ranch owner Cole Hillman (Rory Calhoun) asks the Bennetts to investigate the rampant rabbit ramp-up on the ranch, as the holes are causing Rory's horses no end of trouble. The Bennetts agree to help out even though, as Gerry points out, "rabbits aren't exactly Roy's bag." They consult with local college president Elgin Clark (DeForest Kelley) and science professor Dirkson (Bob Hardy) to come up with a plan to feed hormones to select bunnies to interrupt their breeding cycle. Unfortunately, the Bennett's rabbit-loving daughter Amanda (Melanie Fullerton) mixes up some test subjects and the wrong bunny is set loose on the Hillman ranch. The natural result, of course, is a horde of giant rabbits with a thirst for human blood! Night of the Lepus is a textbook case of a movie for which the only logical response is "What were they thinking?" Both the acting and the general tone are delightfully earnest, with not a hint of cynicism, sarcasm, or even tongue-in-cheek humor. The obvious trap that the filmmakers have walked into is the fact that rabbits are cute and cuddlesome by nature, and no amount of murky close-ups or menacing music can hide the fact that big bunny eyes, even those purportedly belonging to giant man-eaters, are adorable. Aside from camera tricks to make the rabbits appear huge, we are also treated to some fleeting shots of men in bunny suits; as you may well imagine, these shots (as short as 17 frames but still recognizable as men in bunny suits) are less than terrifying. The best thing that can be said about the special effects is that most of the miniature sets are quite good. The rabbits are seen cleaning out a General Store and tromping down several country roads with fencing, road signs, farm buildings - all exhibiting quite a bit of convincing detail. Of course even such painstaking effort can be ruined upon seeing a giant man visible on a miniature set along with the rabbits. Eagle-eyed viewers can spot a bunny wrangler, clearly egging on his hopping charges, in the background of the shot which appears at 1:08:20 on the disc. Producer A. C. Lyles specialized in latter-day B-Westerns, churning out a dozen or so oaters in the 1960s featuring such then-old-timers as Brian Donlevy, Howard Keel, John Agar, and Lon Chaney, Jr. No surprise, then, to see such Western standbys as Rory Calhoun, Paul Fix and DeForest Kelley turn up in his bunny picture. (Kelley will forever be known as Dr. McCoy from Star Trek, but those familiar with his filmography know that he was a cowboy at heart). At least the Publicity department at MGM knew that it would be impossible to honestly sell a movie about giant bunny rabbits. The trailer and the advertising are coy about the nature of the menace. The advertising art (reproduced as the cover of the DVD) depicts several pairs of floating eyes in the darkness, surrounding the principal actors. The eyes as depicted don't look much like rabbit eyes, although they are cross-eyed and silly. The tagline is "How many eyes does horror have? How many times will terror strike?" The wordy movie poster continues: "They were born that tragic moment when Science made its great mistake ...now from behind the shroud of night they come, a scuttling, shambling horde, of creatures destroying all in their path." Do rabbits scuttle or shamble? Not really. A menacing voice in the trailer repeats the same lines and adds "Kill one and thousands take its place." The low-budget ambiance, disconnected screams, and thumping electronic rhythms of the trailer set up something more along the lines of Night of the Living Dead, so it must be a pretty successful trailer! Obviously, there was a confidence that the moviegoing public would not be very curious to get to the bottom of the word "Lepus." The print quality of Night of the Lepus is near to flawless, with not a scratch or speck to be seen. The photographic quality, though, is far from perfect. There is a slight grain in many of the night scenes, and the color looks off, most notably in the form of orange-ish, unnatural skin tones. These are not transfer problems, but most likely occurred during shooting. (You get the feeling that perhaps producer Lyles got a deal on a batch of out-of-date film stock). The aforementioned trailer is in rather good shape, and constitutes the only extra feature. For more information about Night of the Lepus, visit Warner Video. To order Night of the Lepus, go to TCM Shopping. by John M. Miller