Like Christmas movies, Easter movies have only so many iconic touchstones to wave to declare their allegiance to the holiday, but it seems as if Christmas gets more mileage out of its storehouse than Easter does out of its two major devotional images: the resurrection of the Christian Messiah, and cute fluffy bunnies. A glance at the TV listings shows that movies that feature crucifixions clearly predominate on the weekend schedule, even as they tend to shut out movies made by Martin Scorsese or Robert Downey, Sr. But a few minutes of most Biblical movies, especially when compared to the work of Chuck Jones, may leave you wondering if the rabbit movies don't really have the inside track. Night of the Lepus may be the perfect Easter movie just because it makes an effort to meet both camps halfway: it depicts the human race buying itself a second chance at life by crucifying (okay, electrocuting) several acres' worth of giant, rampaging bunny rabbits. Inexplicably, TV programmers have yet to seize on it as a holiday perennial, and the chances that this might be the year that changes got even smaller when Turner Classic Movies ran it last weekend as part of its "TCM Underground" series, thus indicating that the network not only has a real counter-instinct for innovative holiday programming, but that somebody over there detects an unsuspected outlaw-cinema vibe in Stuart Whitman.
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