Yes, they really made a horror movie in the 70s about giant man-eating bunny rabbits. And yes, they called it Night of the Lepus, which was just another blatant attempt by Hollywood to use a dead language (lepus means hare in Latin) to make something cute and lovable seem dangerous and scary. How could something so absurd be any good?

The simple answer: It couldn’t. The fun, instead, comes from pondering how the fuck the filmmakers responsible were able to ignore this simple fact and make the movie anyway.

Stuart Whitman and Janet Leigh play a “young” couple of scientific researchers who have been asked to find a way to slow down the breeding cycle of the local rabbit population, which has grown vast enough to devastate much of the county’s farmland. Inevitably, their research fucks up the ecology and allows the rabbits to grow to the size of Volkswagens and much mayhem ensues until the adorable monsters are finally vanquished — at least, for the moment …

Lepus has a decent cast, but its members are hobbled by the script’s stubborn refusal to acknowledge that its plot is more appropriate for a spoof than a serious horror film. The ludicrous effects are achieved by filming regular-sized rabbits on miniature sets and — in some shots — by a guy in a hilariously freeze-frameable Easter Bunny suit. Director William F. Claxton tries to make up for this with some gore, but all that does is remind you how ridiculous the whole concept is in the first place. —Allan Mott

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Originally shown in 3-D, the “old dark house” thriller The Maze should be called The Castle, or The Castle with a Maze, if they wished to be more specific. Directed by William Cameron Menzies (Invaders from Mars), it follows bachelor Gerald MacTeam (Richard Carlson, Creature from the Black Lagoon) called away to his ancestors’ Craven Castle for reasons most mysterious, just as he is about to be married.

When Gerald sends a letter to his fiancée, Kitty (soap star Veronica Hurst), to break their engagement, she gets suspicious, packs her bags and her aunt (Katherine Emery, Isle of the Dead), and heads off to said Scottish castle uninvited. There, the staff is notoriously tight-lipped; the ladies are locked in their rooms at night; and strange noises emanate from the hallway.

On the grounds stands an elaborate, visually pleasing maze, but don’t expect it to play much of a part in the story outside of the “shocking” climax, in which we learn the lord of the castle is really a 200-year-old giant frog. Yes, the revelation is quite outta nowhere.

The film’s sets are something to behold, but The Maze treads its territory fairly slowly. Seeing it in 3-D may have given it an extra kick, but it would hardly explain the amphibious twist; the plague of frogs at the end of Magnolia made more sense. —Rod Lott