#293 -- Peter Rottentail (2004)

Directors: John Polonia & Mark Polonia
Rating: 2.5 / 5

First off, I want you to know that I really wanted to like this movie. When I found it on Blockbuster Online, I shoved it up to the top of my queue because I hoped that it was going to be great. The synopsis that Blockbuster gave me was extremely intriguing and sounded just stupid enough to be fucking awesome. I'm not going to bash the hell out of it, as I'm sure many, many people have already done. I think the movie had great potential, but it was just missing something -- probably the budget needed to make a movie like this work. I looked on IMDB; it didn't tell me what kind of budget they had to work with, but I assume it was somewhere around ten bucks. And that was probably just for the rabbit costume. Yeah, it's a bad movie -- really bad -- but it does have potential, and there were parts of it that I did kind of enjoy. I'm sure that I'm not the only one. There have to be others who enjoy this kind of thing, and there might even be someone out there who actually really likes this. Me, I didn't like it, which is a shame because I can see what it could have been. 

First thing, we see a magician trying to entertain at a party. I say trying because he's really dreadful. He leaves the party and meets a mysterious person outside. This guy speaks in the worst Jamaican accent I've ever heard in my life (I assume it was supposed be Jamaican because he said "Mon" at the end of every sentence). This guy/person/thing gives him a vial of something and tells him that it's going to help him out. He takes it, though he doesn't really believe anything the guy says. So, the magician, Peter the Great he calls himself, goes to entertain at a birthday party for two little boys. Again, he's dreadful. His rabbit is under the table taking a shit while he's trying to pull it out of his sleeve, he can't pull off any of his tricks, and no one at the party is enjoying him at all. They're actually pretty mean to him, which is understandable when you pay good money for someone who absolutely sucks. So, in an attempt to liven things up a bit, he decides to drink whatever it is that the weird guy gives him. He tells the kids that it's a potion that will turn him into Peter Rottentail, which is the evil offspring of bunny and man. Nothing happens. More mean things are said, and Peter the Great leaves the party feeling pretty dejected. As soon as he leaves, he starts hearing the voice of the weird guy in his head. The guy says that his soul belongs to him now, and that he will have to do his bidding. A magician's hat and a butcher knife appear out of thin air, and Peter chases one of the little boys, trying to kill him. He does not succeed, and he is now wanted by the police, so he goes home and shoots himself in the face. It's the one thing he was able to get right.

Cut to thirteen years later, and those two little boys are all grown up. They are cousins James and Lenny. James apparently is plagued by nightmares of his experience with the crazy magician. The two cousins go to their late grandmother's house to clean it up to be sold, and things go really sour. Peter the Great was summoned by a couple of pot heads a couple of days earlier, he rose from his grave in the form of a demented rabbit, and now he's going on a killing spree, apparently making his way to James. He uses only two weapons: either the butcher knife, or carrots that are apparently so sharp that they can pierce flesh. James is pretty scared throughout the entire movie. His dreams, along with the weird phone calls, make him feel certain that the magician is coming back for him. Lenny, of course, doesn't believe him. Peter eventually does catch up to James, and there's a battle that was clearly inspired by the Three Stooges.

A killer rabbit who uses carrots to kill people? It isn't hard to figure out that it's going to be stupid. I was hoping for an extremely funny, awesome kind of stupid, and I didn't get it. Peter tried to be a funny killer, but he succeeded only 5% of the time. He got a few laughs out of me, but most of them were from surprise at how stupid he was. There were maybe two times that he said something that was actually funny; one of them was when he told a girl, "Nice carrot patch." I'm not really sure what that means, but yeah...it's pretty funny. I also feel that he could have been pretty creepy if they'd used the right kind of lighting and shadows with him, and the guy who played that part was the only semi-decent actor in the entire movie. So, really, Peter was the only thing worthwhile here, and it's just a shame that he didn't live up to what he could have been. The story isn't the problem here; I actually liked that. Sure, it's a stupid plot, but I -- as well as plenty of other people -- can look past that if it's done well. It was even done in a way that made a far-fetched story make some sort of sense. Even the ending, and the way that Peter was defeated -- though it was a little too easy and cheesy -- made enough sense. I applaud them for that much, at least. I hate to say it, but I feel like, if they'd had a larger budget, it could have been better.

Yeah, it's stupid. I'm sure you knew that before you started reading this. But its stupidity isn't what makes it fail. It fails because it didn't live up to the potential I saw in it.