Hot Cross Bunny (1985)

D. Tim Delingpole
Colour


A hot cross bun is a spiced sweet bun made with currants or raisins and marked with a cross on the top, it’s traditionally eaten on Good Friday in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Canada. A bunny is basically a rabbit, with a twitchy little nose, four paws and loping ears. It doesn’t usually come with sunglasses, firearms and a really bad attitude; but let’s just pretend – for sake of argument here – that a bunny is all of those things. As although the pun of the title might indicate that this is somewhat connected with seasonal pastries, the fact is that what we have here is an utterly bizarre Australian horror comedy about an anthropomorphic rabbit with an incredible mean streak, a lust for violence and a nice line in floppy eared puns.


Here we are in downtown Sydney and bullied Oliver Smyth – a more snot nosed little boy it would be difficult to find – makes a wish. He is having a tough time at school and feels friendless and powerless. Rather than burying his nose in his books though and saying he’ll show them one day, he wants revenge. So in his silly and childish thirteen year old boy, he makes a wish – and because of some odd combination of a drop of his blood, the time of year, some magical Easter nonsense, the kind of made up voodoo bullshit you always get in movies like this – he wins himself a friend, and not just any friend. Here is the actual Easter bunny, Rocky is his name and he is armed and sneering and just the rabbit to sort out young Oliver’s problems.


Without a doubt Rocky is a fantastic creation, he is smart, profane and has a line in wisecracks that suggests the screenwriters were looking to graduate to James Bond one day. He is also remorselessly violent, so much so that everyone who has been rude to Oliver – or sneers at his new three foot tall very furry friend – is going to get his. Voiced by a pre-Crocodile Dundee Paul Hogan, there is a lot of charm to this rabbit, a lot of spunk and likeable antihero vigour to this bunny. However the thing that people are more likely to remember about the creation is how remarkably low-tech he is. You see, Rocky may be a tough rabbit, but he’s realised with what is basically a glove puppet. It makes for a really odd film, with Rocky talked up as big and tough and yet in reality being a hand puppet in a leather jacket shot really close to the camera so it seems roughly in proportion to his human co-stars.


I said this was a horror comedy; well its charms lie distinctly more in the latter than the former.
That said when the violence gets going, the gore content is quite high. Fellow pupils, sneering girls and even one teacher (British comedian Mel Smith in a sweating cameo) are all dispatched in ways gruesome and horrible (as long as you forget that what’s causing these outrages is basically an expletive happy version of Sooty). It’s a ridiculous set up but one which comes with oodles of charm. And since thousands of miles away at the same time, such a high-tech maestro as George Lucas was making a duck his hero with no charm whatsoever, then one has to say that if you are going to make a film with a homicidal rabbit – this is probably the way to go.