Thursday, July 15, 2021

Bunnyman Vengeance (2017)

This kind of movie is honestly tough to review because you know it wasn’t really serious. It’s a fucking guy in a bunny costume. That could be the whole thing right there, but it wouldn’t be fun to read.

Director: Carl Lindbergh

Co-written with Michelle.

The first one, at least, was funny – particularly the Grindhouse edition we reviewed a while ago, which was so batshit and absurd that it rose to some weird arthouse level of insane humor. I didn't see the second one and in fact only found out about that just as I was finishing this review. So if there's something I missed from that movie that could've put context to the nonsense that is this one, I apologize and I'll revoke everything I said.

I guess it starts out with this black dude getting stopped by a cop. You might think this is a parallel to real life, that we’re about to really get some serious social commentary from this movie about a man in a bunny costume. But no, the cop just grills him on whether he’s left or right handed, I guess as the script’s attempt to make tension with the fact that the black dude is hiding a gun out of the cop’s sight. But it’s as boring as the most boring thing you can think of. No tension and nothing happens. Great scene!

Then we see the Bunnyman on the same road and he’s beating up some random child in a bag. There’s no real context and it comes off mostly tasteless… he sets the now lifeless, possibly dead kid up at this bus stop and I’m mostly wondering who’s going to school way out there, they’re in the middle of the desert and there’s literally nothing around. But I’m thinking too hard. The Bunnyman puts the unconscious/dead (?) child on the bench, then gets mad and kicks the bench over? I don’t know. Maybe someone else can make this make any fucking sense.

The cop shows up and tries to apprehend the Bunnyman, and then the black guy from before runs him down with his car and addresses the Bunnyman – “Michael, get in!” Apparently they’re all part of some kind of criminal gang or whatever? I guess they have some big fortress in the desert and they shoot people who randomly accidentally get too close. There are some scenes where they try and make drama with all these guys in the compound, but it eludes me like a faint gust of wind. I couldn’t tell you anything that happened in this if you had a gun to my head.

There are just a shitload of boring scenes in this thing – boring scenes of the Bunnyman interacting with a deaf mute, looking at old photos that I guess are supposed to mean something about his past, eating dinner with these guys who run the compound. There’s just nothing that happens. It’s like the director was just given a $20 bill as a budget plus a scrap of napkin from a cocktail bar with the word “guy in bunny outfit” as the only script, and he just had to improvise because he needs the money to feed his family who are currently living under a bridge somewhere.

Or sometimes there IS stuff that happens, like when the gang kidnaps these random people in the woods and tortures them by making these women choose between drinking poison or having spiders crawl on them! That’s weird, right? Later on he chainsaws some more random people in this weird carnival attraction the gang is running. There’s really not much more context to it. The whole fucking movie is just random scenes of slow, badly acted, random murder scenes. I wish I could say it was even funny like the first one. The best we get is a non sequitur musical trip-out scene of the Bunnyman flying through space or some shit, seemingly just thrown in at random in the middle of the murder scenes. But this is only funny in comparison to the dour tone of everything else, which has the atmosphere of sitting in the DMV for too long while you have to pee.

I mean I guess there are a few funny parts though – the main guy is trying to have this whole circus or carnival event or whatever it is, and one of the Bunnyman kidnapping victims comes running out screaming that they’re being killed. The carnival guy’s response is to take out a gun and shoot her right there in front of everyone! Who says being a businessman is hard?

I can’t even really keep talking about this because it’s all just nonsense. There’s no plot here. It’s just a dude in a bunny costume doing random stuff. That sounds like it should be more fun than this is. I hate to even rag on this shit since it’s not even really a movie made with any serious budget behind it. I should have spent this time bashing something lame and corporate. Or watching good movies. I thought this one would at least be entertaining schlock but we’re all wrong occasionally, even me, I’ll admit to it right here.

Oh well. Happy trails, everybody.

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