Main cast: Diane Foster (Jeanie Cooper), Kelly Grant (Carol), Allison Lobel (Mary Lou), Zuri Starks (Megan), D’Andre Noiré (Lance Cooper), Zach Kanner (Sam), Miles Cooper (Eugene), Gavin Lee (Jim), Jamie Cline (The Jackalope)
Director: Diane Foster
Easter Bloody Easter is about, yes, a demonic jackalope running around town killing people a week or so before Easter.
It’s weird why a series of unexplained murders happen around the place. I mean, the place is practically run by the perpetually disingenuous mean girl head of the church committee, Mary Lou, who urges the congregants to cheer up during a funeral because she’s taking the spotlight from the oddly sickly pastor to explain the Easterpalooza itinerary during that weekend, and everyone is just fake-polite and generally being awful to one another…
Jesus with a muffin top, I can see why this place is targeted for some Easter murder-palooza.
Anyway, Jeanie Cooper is too numbed by her own personal issues to care too much about other people, alive or dead. You see, her husband Lance has been MIA for about a week, he doesn’t return her calls, and worse, his truck is eventually found in a beaten up state with him still missing.
With all the dead bodies popping up, Jeannie and her BFF Carol as well as Lance’s BFF Sam decide to go look for him themselves. Megan, a former beauty queen turned jackalope slayer, will join soon in the fun.
This one makes no pretenses about being an unapologetic comedy: from the opening scene, the script written by the actress that plays Mary Lou s a parody of Hallmark-style small town comedies as well as slasher films while riffing scenes from popular action movies here and there.
While clearly a movie made on a pretty small budget, this one is unexpectedly amusing. In fact, Mary Lou is so over the top ridiculous that she is arguably the true villain in this movie, but this campy-evil aspect of the character is entertaining to watch.
Director and lead actor Diane Foster plays Jeanie as the rare sober person here—in terms of personality that is, as the character is drinking tad more than the other characters due to her personal issues—and Jeanie eventually comes to her own as a kick-ass babe. This more straight-laced aspect of her character plays off nicely against the more over the top characters of Carol, Mary Lou, and Megan.
The special effects are pretty cheap and even bad under typical circumstances, but they are right at home in this cheap but sassy, silly thing. Sure, the killer bunnies look like plastic battery-run toy rabbits with CGI bright eyes, but they are actually cute in a way.
The trouble with this movie, however, is that it loses steam considerably when it enters its third act and ramps up the action aspects. Comedy, not beating up monsters, is the true forte of this thing, and as a result, the third act feels just long and not as fun as the earlier parts of the movie.
Still, this is one movie that manages to turn its budgetary constraints into charming quirks and the humor works on me. It may be more successful as a parody of a Hallmark small town comedy than a comedic horror film, but I still have had fun, so yay indeed.
