Our rabbits need a new patch, and this seems the best place.
Hopefully the old BHF crew will find their way here over the coming days and we'll have some chat about tonight's screening of The Strange Door and Blood From The Mummy's Tomb.
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The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. I don't much like Godzilla or its many, many ripoffs and I don't much like this one either. There's a certain charm in Harryhausen's SFX, although not in the poor underwater scenes, but, as is usually the case with these films, the dialogue is pretty poor and the monster isn't very interesting. I much prefer director Eugène Lourié's British takes on this genre, Gorgo and The Giant Behemoth (Lourié directed 4 theatrical features and the only one that wasn't about a giant reptile was about a big robot, The Colossus of New York).
Night of the Lepus. Having watched this one not long before the demise of the BHF board I watched it with one of the commentary tracks this time. It points out that the huge success of Willard (which I watched last year and didn't like) sparked a rush of studios acquiring any properties focusing on "small animal horror"*. One such novel was Russell Braddon's The Year of the Angry Rabbit (currently yours from Amazon for £890.80 with FREE DELIVERY) which is a satirical SF novel in which Australia tries to take over the planet, very different from what ended up on the screen. The main problem with Night of the Lepus is that it's not as bad as a movie about killer giant rabbits ought to be. It has creditable actors in many of the roles and is mainly quite competent - apart from the bunny FX - and there's only a small amount of howlingly funny dialogue (albeit that "There's a herd of killer rabbits heading this way" is a classic). Somehow, you want non-actors fluffing their lines, answering phones that haven't rung and day-for-night scenes so dazzlingly bright that everyone has to wear sunglasses.
*I think Frogs may be the best of these.