Film review – Easter Bloody Easter

My notes on Easter Bloody Easter

There have been Easter-themed horror movies before – Chad Ferrin’s Easter Bunny Kill! Kill!, most notably, and Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, arguably.  This engaging effort from director-star Diane Foster (of the Orphan Killer films) and writer-star Allison Lobel – which notably has a mostly female crew – is a regional comedy horror in the 1970s style with a refreshing emphasis on middle-aged women characters and a halfway decent whodunit angle.

The town of Walburg TX – as Easter-obsessed as that place in My Bloody Valentine was in Valentine’s Day – is troubled by bizarre phenomena even as local queenpin Marylou (Lobel) tries to corral everyone into a three-day Easterpalooza celebration complete with bunny hop dance and easter egg hunt.  One resident is transforming werewolf-like into a jackalope – an antlered giant rabbit monster, represented by a fuzzy felt outfit which still comes across as quite disturbing – which shits sparkly easter eggs, disembowels folk it takes a dislike to and controls red-eyed killer rabbits who gnaw away at townsfolk.  Heroine Jeanie (Foster) and her loyal best friend Carol (Kelly Grant) twig that something is badly wrong and even start listening to tinfoil-hat conspiracy theorist Sam (Zach Kanner) – but it takes the return of local ninja Megan (Zuri Starks), intent on revenge, to alert them to the real threat of the Jackalope.  Meanwhile, Jeanie’s husband Lance (D’Amdre Noiré) is missing, there’s bad feeling between Jeanie as smarmy Mayor Lou (Adam Slemon), Marylou (not to be confused with Mary Lou, though she always is) fights off a challenge to her chairing of the church committee by a hissing enemy (Faye Viviana) who’s an early victim.  Every man in town – a coughing intolerant preacher (Richard Rivera), a bigoted asshole sheriff (Jackson Gutierrez), Mary Lou’s adenoidal wimp husband (Miles Cooper), Carol’s niceguy husband (Gavin K. Lee) — and not a few women – Marylou’s limping Renfield Sally (Caitlin Oden) – is a solid suspect in the hunt for the alter ego of the Jackalope (Jamie B. Cline).

In the spirit of Alferd Packer: The Musical! or Zombeavers, it’s gruesome in a slapstick way — but also goodhearted.  Foster resurrects a 1940s/50s character type (cf: She-Wolf of London, Daughter of Dr Jekyll) as a woman worried she’s furthering a monstrous curse, but there’s a nice bickering friendship with loyal pal Grant and even funny fond business with archenemy Lobel – these women have known each other since school and have a complicated relationship which includes their husbands but is on a level the men won’t ever understand.  Not all the jokes land but there’s plenty of funny stuff – plus a lively music score (yes, there’s a bunny hop line-dancing scene), a lot of colourful costumes (and hairdos) and some decent worldbuilding/mythmaking about its particular underrepresented cryptid.