I don't care how hard up you are for holiday-themed entertainment on Easter - Beaster Day (aka Here Comes Peter Cottonhell) should be avoided at all costs. Don't get suckered in by the title, or the pretty cool box art, or the "giant killer bunny" premise. It's a low budget effort - imdb has it at $150,000 - but someone is getting hosed somewhere because I have a hard time believing it was that expensive. And actually "effort" would probably be overselling it. It seems to be part of the trend where filmmakers will come up with a marketable title, and then worry if there's even enough there to shoot a movie. And here, I guess they figured a puppet, super-shitty CGI, and a threadbare story would be enough. And Amazon bought it, so there's that. And then I watched it, so there's that too.
The majority of the movie is just scenes of random person after random person doing something in the woods, then getting "attacked" by a giant killer bunny. Or at least a puppet that looks giant through movie magic. It's a marionette with a rodent-skull kind of face, and it would maybe look cool in some kind of outsider art puppet show. But after seeing it flop around onscreen time and time again it looses what little appeal it may have had. (And seriously, I wanted to screencap a picture, but it kind of looks interesting in a still frame. I don't want to encourage seeing this in any way.) You never see any of the attacks. Rather, the victim screams, the bunny does something off camera, and then you cut to the body. The aftermath is almost always someone who has a portion of their body missing. The FX team figured out how to block out parts of a person and add blood using CGI - and boy, are they going to use that skill!
The story? It's kind of like Jaws if everyone was unlikeable dogcatchers instead of fishermen. A small-ish town in Pennsylvania is on the verge of a big Easter festival that will bring in lots and lots of money. The dismembered bodies out in the woods are freaking people out a bit, but the "hilarious" stoner mayor is convinced that "unsafe tools" (like hammers, saws, etc.) are to blame. But to ease the public's fear, he has the town dog catchers on watch. Our two main dogcatchers are a guy (sorry to zone out the names, but I'm not going back to check) that's a socially awkward nerd - but not the kind you like. He seems more like a sociopath. The other is a young woman who just needs a job, and nerdy guy is training her in... and they kind of stumble into rescuing the town, for some reason.
Beaster Day is one of those movies that tries to be really funny, but hardly any of the jokes land. Also, the filmmakers seem to think that "not trying" equals funny. Maybe I'm just being an old stick in the mud, but the effort on display here is so half-hearted that I couldn't enjoy it on any level. Well, that's a lie. I laughed once, and it was actually a decent joke/delivery. But that's not a very good average. A couple of the reviews I've read have said something along the lines of "hilariously terrible," but I can't even see that. Maybe watching it stoned with some friends would help, but that would seem like a waste of drugs to me. I'd rather go hang out outside or something. I can't see myself enjoying Beaster Day under any circumstances whatsoever.
I would definitely not recommend this film.
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