Crew
Director – Diane Foster, Screenplay – Allison Lobel, Story – Will Amato & Mitchell Olson, Producers – Will Amato, Diane Foster, Rafi Jacobs, Liana Montemayor & Mitchell Olson, Photography – Alexa Cha, Music – Mark Vogel, Visual Effects Supervisor – Foster Media & Paca Thomas, Special Effects – Ashley Stansbury, Demon Bunnies – Raptor House FX (Supervisor – Jesse Velez), Production Design – Wally Coleman-Poggi. Production Company – Wallybird Productions/Nun Better Entertainment/Point South Productions
Cast
Diane Foster (Jeanie Cooper), Kelly Grant (Carol), Allison Lobel (Marylou), Zuri Starks (Megan Jennings), D’Andre Noire (Lance Cooper), Miles Cooper (Eugene), Zach Kanner (Sam McCormick), Caitlin Oden (Sally Beans), Gavin Lee (Jim), Jamie Cline (The Jackalope), Adam Slemon (Mayor Lou), Jackson Gutierrez (Sheriff), Richard Rivera (Pastor), Reed Foster & Liana Montemayor (Teenagers), Faye Viviana (Annie Sue), Nathan Pratt (Easter Bunny Josh)
Plot
In Walburg, Texas, Jeanie Cooper is deeply upset because her husband Lance has gone missing. Easterpalooza, the celebrations the town puts on for Easter, are being organised by the overbearing Marylou. At the same time, dead bodies are turning up around the town. The conspiracy theorist Sam insists that people are being killed by a jackalope. Jeanie then sees killer rabbits. As more victims are claimed around the town, Jeanie and her best friend Carol try to fight off the jackalope and stop invading Easterpalooza, while finding which of the townspeople it has disguised itself as.
The Easter horror film is not nearly as prolific as the Christmas horror film, nevertheless is a growing phenomenon. So far we have had the likes of Serial Rabbit (2006), Easter Bunny Kill! Kill! (2006), Easter Bunny Bloodbath (2010), The Bunnyman Massacre (2011) and sequels, Easter Casket (2013), Beaster Day: Here Comes Peter Cottonhell (2014), Easter Sunday (2014), Easter Bunny Massacre (2021), Easter Holocaust (2020) and Easter Evil (2024), all low-budget films, plus one of the episodes of the anthology Holidays (2016). In Easter Bloody Easter, the legend of the Easter Bunny has been merged with the character of the jackalope, which actually started as a piece of rural mythology in 1932 when a Wyoming taxidermist connected deer antlers to a rabbit carcass and then began to sell it as a novelty item.
Easter Bloody Easter was a directorial debut for Diane Foster who is best known as an actress with about sixteen films to her name since the early 2000s. Early on, Foster moved to also producing the films she appears in with the likes of the crime drama Iowa (2005), the horror film The Orphan Killer (2011) and the romance Before the Dawn (2019). Easter Bloody Easter has been largely made between the three leads. Foster directs and stars, screenwriter Allison Lobel plays the bitchy Marylou, while Kelly Grant who plays the best friend also acts as a producer.
It takes you a little while to realise that Easter Bloody Easter is being played as a Horror Comedy. The film is set in an existing Texan town and everybody in the film plays with wildly exaggerated Texan accents (despite which the film was actually shot in California). The film lays into the Southern small-town lifestyle and church social circles with an amusingly satiric bite. Between them, Diane Foster and Allison Lobel find a wonderfully caricatured tone and manage to keep it surprisingly consistent the entire way through the film.
However, when the film starts introducing a horde of killer bunnies with red eyes, these look just like cheap sock puppets and the film takes a nosedive from the amusing into just being another low-budget horror film. On the other hand, about the point that we get to the Easter Egg Hunt being invaded by the jackalope around the one-hour mark, Easter Bloody Easter becomes a whole lot more entertaining. Diane Foster goes for broke and throws in a heap of gore effects as the jackalope and attendant bunnies wade through the attendees en masse.
Diane Foster was a not a name that registered on me before this, but she gives a fine performance here. She is now hitting around her mid-forties but slots into the role of the housewife with a mix of high-blown vulnerability and fierce determination. Kelly Grant falls into place alongside with a good performance too but Foster drags the whole show in the wake of her willpower. By the point that Foster puts on a black leather jacket and wields a samurai sword against the jackaplope, she should have secured her standing as a future horror heroine.
Trailer here