Don’t ask how or why, but they made another one. The third and allegedly final movie in the Bunnyman trilogy (no really, there are three), Bunnyman Vengeance brings the bloody return of the fancy dress psychopath: this time in a run-down old haunted house attraction.
After slaughtering a whole school bus full of children in the previous movie (don’t worry if you haven’t seen it), Bunnyman continues on his path of trying too hard, conflating outrage and incoherence with good horror filmmaking. Returning home to his family of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Rob Zombie rejects, Bunnyman struggles to settle down and fit in. It’s not long before the family are at each other’s throats… but with chainsaws.
If you’re three films deep (!) into the Bunnyman series by now, you’ll know what to expect. You might even be on board for it. If you managed to sit through the unwatchable first movie, you may even consider Vengeance to be a masterpiece by comparison. Three films in (!), at least these things are no longer quite so boring. The weirdness, surrealism and creepiness are all amped up to their hilt by now, still fixated on capturing that Tobe Hooper vibe the first movie so magnificently failed at. The low budget is well spent, the deliberately cheap visuals only adding to the Grindhouse mood and atmosphere. With barely an attempt at narrative structure, scenes come and go without context, interspersed with traumatic flashbacks to the Bunnyman’s childhood and vignettes of 8mm weirdness.
The resultant movie is half surrealist arthouse picture, half boring no-budget horror film. With its truly bizarre Twin Peaks-esque music video dream sequence – nearly five minutes of actual brilliance – Bunnyman Vengeance is too entertainingly weird to dismiss entirely, but also too terrible to ever recommend.
Lindbergh is onto a good thing and he knows it – the bunny suit is effortlessly unsettling, and there’s something about the industrial roar of a chainsaw that never fails to thrill – so why not keep on coming back to it? Like the Charles Band killer clown Killjoy (now five films in!), Bunnyman is ridiculous enough that he should always find viewers suckered in by the concept. In that respect, Bunnyman Vengeance is practically critic-proof.
BUNNYMAN VENGEANCE /CERT: TBC / DIRECTOR & SCREENPLAY: CARL LINDBERGH / STARRING: DIANA PRINCE, MARSHAL HILTON, BRADLEY BUNDLIE / RELEASE DATE: VOD OUT NOW
