Those were the good old days. A local independent TV station screened a really bad sci fi or horror film every Friday night and called the program "Creature Feature." One developed a whole vocabulary of B-film references. And "The Night of the Lepus" contributed mightily to it.
The premise was one popular in 1972: science producing unintended negative consequences. A rancher hires two scientists to inoculate the wild rabbits, who are annoying his cattle, with something that will make them stop breeding. Instead, the elixir makes them 25 feet tall and carnivorous.
"In order to facilitate their growth, the rabbits need extra protein, and what better source than the relatively slow-moving human population that surrounds their huge subterranean lairs?" ~ New York Times.
The best part of the whole movie is the "special effects" in which real bunnies are filmed in slow motion, trampling balsa-wood replicas of farmhouses and towns. One doubts that the producers had quite as much audience laughter in mind as is produced by these scenes.
An amazing thing about "Lepus" was the number of well-known actors in it: Stuart Whitman, Janet Leigh, Rory Calhoun, DeForest Kelley, and Paul Fix.
Officer Lopez: "Attention! Attention! Ladies and gentlemen, attention! There is a herd of killer rabbits headed this way and we desperately need your help!"
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0069005/P.S. lepus = Latin for hare. The scientific name of the black-tailed jack rabbit is Lepus californicus.
