"Hate Little Rabbit" is a new film by Bazz Hancher sent to me for review by him. He added that I should write an honest review even if I hate it. His integrity should be praised, but a negative review will not be necessary at all.
I had seen gore scenes from other Hancher movies on You Tube, and already knew that I liked his microbudget 80s-video type of filmmaking. "Hate Little Rabbit" confirms this in bloody spades.
Hancher here wanted to make a British giallo. I found this to go beyond the average giallo with its dark gruesomeness, but in its doing so the giallo territory gets fully covered and then some.
A masked killer is slaughtering and kidnapping people related to a young woman with a troubled family history. As it would in a giallo, the plot gets complicated from there.
The production here is crisp and clean-looking despite its working-class settings. It is well-photographed and well-directed by Hancher with a great gloomy, autumnal atmosphere and Casio-like 80s-inspired music. It is the acting that could be the deciding factor overall in such a film, and I am happy to report that I found it amusingly campy in most cases here. The assumedly inexperienced actors may have gone all-out to be "professional." But they succeed by coming across as entertainingly kitschy. Some of the accents might need subtitles for those not used to them. But this lends scenes a realistic air in that strange way that only a B movie can.
Not that there is nothing disturbing here, as there most certainly is. The movie starts with a portly, fully naked masked man approaching a young girl's room. Disturbing enough for you?
So, let's get to the violence and "lighten things up." Our masked killer pounds a girl into a pulp with a hammer. A blood-spitting, eyes-bleeding fellow gets choked by a chain. Someone's face gets neatly smashed off by a blow from a concrete block (it sounds unlikely, but wait till you see it!). Fingers get bitten off. Someone hangs themself and urinates while dying. Someone else gets a horrendous bloody beating with a baseball bat. Another someone else gets a bloody knife in the neck and so on. All of this is done cheaply, practically and super-entertainingly the way most of us like it.
Once Bazz makes this available, horror-gore fans should grab it and have themselves a good old-fashioned gory time. Congratulations to Bazz and company and may they bring us more horror goodness as soon as possible.