I can hardly believe I watched the entirety of Peter Rottentail (2004). The imagination of this film pretty much stops at the title.

It's the story of a third-rate children's party magician who becomes, oh, I suppose it could be called a were-bunny.

The costume makes Peter appear not so much bunny-like as like someone wearing the head of a stuffed toy for a mask, plus a couple of oven mits with claws taped on.

There's enough comedy here for a three minute bit on Mad TV, & even stretched out tediously into a film, it might've been delightful as campy crapola, but it doesn't rise even to that level of ignobility.

The DVD has lots of extras -- two commentary tracks, several short interviews, art & photos. What is amazing about the content of the special features is nobody has even a faint whiff of a sense of humor about themselves, about the film, about anything. Which might explain why this dog of a no-budget movie filmed in six days with all the directors' relatives helping out isn't funny.

Well, I did laugh once or twice in places that were surprisingly enough intentionally funny, but my previous plan to watch this Z-movie's brother-directors' entire ouvre stops right here.



Kottentail (2005) weighs in at less than an hour length, which about as much of one joke as anyone could stand.

It opens in a laboratory that consists of a wall, a table, & a wire cage with a plush-toy rabbit in it. The scientist is torturing the plush-toy, which jumps around on the end of a string.

So we're thrown immediately into a level of "comedy" that induces an exchange of glances with one's viewing buddy, mutually wondering, "They thought that'd be funny?"

When animal rights nutsacks turn the toy bunny loose, it attacks a farmer, Hans Kottentail (Nathan Faudree), who turns into a rabbit-headed psycho killer in bib coveralls & red plaid shirt. Now that is funny.

Considering that nobody on the production team could bother to come up with anything better than store-bought toy bunnies to play the rabbit, the rabbit-head mask for Hans is really pretty wonderful.

The cast features lots of attractive women including honest-to-shit Playboy Bunny Bridget Marquard.

The good-looking babes (Kristin Abbott, Patricia Bellemore, Heather Darling, Noel Francomano) came to the film by participating in an on-line contest called "I Want To Be a Scream Queen."

These gals appear glad to be here & they do a better job than most non-actresses who appear in no-budget slashers. They get a few good one-liners off, too.

And the majority of these aspiring scream queens have appeared in more low-end horror since, so if that was their acting goal, they've arrived in Successville.

The film's best ideal for comedy gore routines is having Hans Kottentail savagely carving up Playboy Bunnies in Playboy Club outfits complete with bunny ears. The girls act heroic in their desire to take down the raging rabbit, like a gang of outlaw vigilantes, but they end up being nothing more than bodies on which the make-up crew can create disembowelment gags.

Obviously this film is stupid & lame, but compared to Peter Rottentail it's pretty decent for a Z-budget turd. I think just about anyone who starts out weird enough to even want to put such a film in their dvd player at all will get some laughs out of it.

copyright © by Paghat the Ratgirl