While Christmas and even Thanksgiving have the lion’s share of holiday-themed horror movies, they aren’t the only calendar event to get the horror treatment. There are more than a few movies set around Easter out there as well, from the not-really-Easter-themed Nazi zombies of Dead Snow to the infamous Night of the Lepus and even the punerrific Beaster Day: Here Comes Peter Cottonhell.
Coming from the writer/director duo of Diane Foster, who also plays lead character Jeanie, and Allison Lobel, who plays the domineering, performative-Christian Mary Lou who is responsible for the town’s Easter festivities, Easter Bloody Easter tells the tale of a small town where Easter is a big thing every year. Only this year the festivities are disrupted by an increasingly large body count as the evil Jackalope and his army of demonic bunnies invade the town and sets about slaughtering everyone.
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For those unfamiliar, the jackalope is one of the “fearsome critters” from American folklore and the tales that surround it suggest that it can imitate human voices and rather enjoys singing, and that it can be enticed with whiskey, the jackalope’s tipple of choice. This version, however, exists only to glory in violence, murder, and popping out plastic eggs filled with blood.
Moving swiftly on, let’s examine the core question. Is this film any good? The answer is no. Not really. But it’s entertainingly terrible, from the far-too-cheerful and creepy sheriff (Jackson Gutierrez) to the sleazy, cowardly mayor (Adam Slemon) and Mary Lou’s browbeaten husband Eugene (Miles Cooper), every character is immediately identifiable and memorable, each with a simple character trait that means the audience is never likely to forget who’s who.
The jackalope himself is a simple and fun design which, admittedly, does just look like a man running around in a fursuit but he’s so entertaining to watch you rapidly stop caring and just get on for the ride. His horde of little demonic bunnies are also made up of a mix of perfectly normal bunnies doing normal bunny things, which are replaced by plush bunnies and hand-puppets with sharp teeth and evil red eyes when the minions need to murder some people.
Now the film isn’t without problems, silly plot and cheap-looking fursuits aside. There’s a scene where it strongly appears that the actors accidentally broke one of their microphones, leading to distorted and muffled sounds so the editors had no choice but to silence part of their dialogue, and then horribly ADR in something that really isn’t even vaguely like what the actors were saying. It was like briefly being transported back to some old-school chop-sockey levels of mouths and dialogue being out of sync. There’s also a point around halfway through the film where it just stops for an extended music and dance number that brings the plot crashing to a halt.
All in all, Easter Bloody Easter is a deeply silly film. It’s not great, but it’s not terrible either. It walks that fine line between dreadful and entertaining and is well worth a look for genre fans, or for folks looking for a new film to riff on with a group of friends.
Easter Bloody Easter is now streaming in the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
