Crew
Director/Screenplay – Chad Ferrin, Producer – Trent Haaga, Photography – Giuseppe Asaro, Music – The Giallos Flame, Special Makeup Effects – Margaux L. Frankel, Production Design – Dakota Warren. Production Company – Crappy World Films.
Cast
Timothy Muskatell (Remington Rashkor), Ricardo Gray (Nicholas Peters), Charlotte Marie (Mindy Peters), David Z. Stamp (Ray Mann), Jose I. Lopez (Jorge), Amy Szychowski (Brooke), Kelle Ward (Candy), Marina Blumenthal (Lupe), Ernesto Redarta (Jesus B.F. Ferrer), Wolf Dangler (Bunny Killer), Trent Haaga (Bum/Donald)
Plot
It is Easter Eve. Mindy Peters invites her new boyfriend Remington over to her place, while trying to keep her intellectually handicapped 18-year-old son Nicholas out of the way in his room. Unknown to her, Remington has just come from conducting an armed robbery of a convenience store during which he has shot the clerk. Mindy is called in to do a double-shift in her nursing job and decides to leave Remington in charge of Nicholas for the night. Nicholas has just been given a bunny by a mysterious derelict he meets outside but Remington threatens to kill the bunny unless Nicholas shuts up and does not say anything about what he is up to. Remington brings two hookers back home and allows the crippled paedophile Ray to go into Nicholas’s room in return for drugs and money. At the same time, the handyman Jorge, who has just been fired by Mindy, breaks into the house to rob it. However, someone wearing an Easter Bunny mask is in the house and begins to kill each of the intruders.
Easter Bunny Kill! Kill! was the third film from Minnesota-based director Chad Ferrin. Ferrin first appeared with the psycho film Unspeakable (2000), which received distribution through Troma, and then went onto The Ghouls (2003) about a journalist discovering zombies. Subsequent to this, he made the equally madcap Someone’s Knocking at the Door (2009) about demonic rapists, the Death Row horror The Chair (2016), Parasites (2016) about killer homeless people, the gonzo comedy Exorcism at 60,000 Feet (2020), the H.P. Lovecraft film H.P. Lovecraft’s The Deep Ones (2020), Night Caller (2021) with a phone psychic against a serial killer and its sequel Scalper (2023), the True Crime Pig Killer (2022), and H.P. Lovecraft’s The Old Ones (2024).
Easter Bunny Kill! Kill! was instantly slapped with the label of a cult item – as much for its title than anything else, one suspects. It is slightly less than that but Chad Ferrin takes the film into admirably perverse territory. Ferrin is still perfecting his craft and there is an occasional overstressed amateurishness but most of the time he shows a considerable degree of assurance and undeniable promise as a genre director. One is certainly more than interested in seeing what Chad Ferrin puts out next.
By its very title, Easter Bunny Kill! Kill! draws comparison to Russ Meyer’s films, with the title and its use of punctuation having clearly been intended to emulate Meyer’s trash classic Faster Pussycat, Kill! Kill! (1965). On the other hand, Chad Ferrin’s approach is very different to Russ Meyer’s. For one, there is a lack of Meyer’s sleaze in Ferrin’s direction – where Meyer makes everything, including his pneumatically over-inflated women, into a cartoonish caricatures, Ferrin plays things out on a more realistic level. Perhaps you could compare Easter Bunny Kill! Kill! to its titular model Faster Pussycat, Kill! Kill! – or perhaps more so to a Meyer-inspired film like Thundercrack! (1975) – and see it a slasher movie version of Meyer’s torrid melodramatics but played straight.
Chad Ferrin throws in an amusing array of lowlifes. He in particular gets a perverse and creepy performance from David Z. Stamp as a crippled paedophile and a fine one from Timothy Muskatell as the criminal on the lam. There are a number of extremely gory despatches – David Z. Stamp getting a powerdrill through the head, Ernesto Redarta having his head repeatedly bashed in with a hammer, Jose I. Lopez being despatched with a handheld buzzsaw. Easter Bunny Kill! Kill! works at one in its admirably sordid way before arriving at a quite reasonable surprise revelation of the identity of the bunny-masked killer and going out on an admirably perverse upbeat note.
The low budget gives the film a raggedly raw look. The house where everything takes place is passed off as being under renovation, for instance, no doubt allowing Ferrin and his crew to get away with cutting a few corners in building sets by converting existing buildings and covering much of the household in plastic sheeting. It is certainly a far more authentic slasher film than any of the tiresome modern pretenders that seek to appeal to the teen demographic.
Trailer here