It’s time to take a look at a new horror movie, this one coming to us from the indie sphere and the good folks over at WallyBird Productions. This won’t be my first time covering an indie horror project, but it will be the first time I cover something quite like this. Another of the proud tradition of both ‘holiday slashers’ and ‘purposefully corny horror with a weird killer’, it’s Easter Bloody Easter!
Easter Bloody Easter follows Jeanie (Diane Foster), who, after discovering her husband missing and his car wrecked, embarks on a journey with her friend Carol (Kelly Grant) to uncover the truth behind the town’s dark legend of the killer Jackalope. Now, Jeanie and Carol must team up with professional bunny slayer Megan (Zuri Starks) to save their small town Texas home and stop the Jackalope once and for all.
Following in the footsteps of Night of the Lepus and Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Easter Bloody Easter sets out to make bunnies scary. Or rather, given that this a deliberately and knowingly clunky, goofy, low budget horror movie more in line with the work of Full Moon Features, the goal is to pretend that bunnies are scary while delivering a good time. Does it succeed?
Whether or not you like Easter Bloody Easter is going to be a matter of personal taste. This is, of course, true with most things, but there’s a particular and special argument to be made for a movie like this.
There are two kinds of low budget indie slashers. The ones that take themselves very seriously and try to produce the best (or at least slickest) experience they can, for better or for worse (Winnie the Pooh Blood and Honey is the most prominent of these to come out recently), and the ones that aren’t here for a long time but a weird time (see pretty much every movie Full Moon Features has ever made).
Which one is Easter Bloody Easter? A few years ago I’d have told you it was a werewolf esque plot using a killer Jackalope who commands an army of vicious bunnies terrorizing a small town, but we now live in a world where someone is trying to make Winnie the Pooh earnestly scary. So instead, visual aids. This is their killer
and these are the Jackalope’s evil bunny minions
and this is the Jackalope’s army. We are firmly in the latter camp, and Easter Bloody Easter makes no apologies for that fact. So whether or not you’ll enjoy it kinda depends on where you stand on this sort of horror movie.
Unlike most of its ilk, I will give Easter Bloody Easter some serious props in that, by and large, everything is played straight. Performances are clunky and awkward, but the actors are giving it their all and going all in. Everyone is extremely Southern, and they’re played with such commitment that while the writing may be clunky and awkward you never doubt the performances. Everyone feels like they’re real people. Most of them aren’t people I’d want to spend time with, but the point remains, and I give all my praise to the actors for playing these roles to the hilt so well. Likewise, when it decides to lean into gross out humor (the Jackalope poops blood filled Easter eggs, as an example), the movie drives right on by rather than lingering, allowing them to have their gross and cringe jokes without mugging to the camera or grinding to a screeching halt like so many other movies of this type.
The effects and kills are…low budget. This is not a horror movie that makes up for its low budget with seriously impressive gore or creative kills. Expect to see a lot of people holding stuffed rabbits to themselves while covered in fake blood.
All in all, Easter Bloody Easter is a perfectly fine cheesy slasher movie, one that falls purely into the horror camp. If that’s your thing, you should have a good time watching this on VOD. However, if purposefully awkward writing, cringe humor, and extremely Southern folks aren’t your bag, you’re not going to find much else here.
Images courtesy of WallyBird Productions
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