The Screening Room

We live in an era when too many movie trailers and commercials give away far too much — including all the best jokes, all the biggest shocks and sometimes even the ending of the film. If you talk to marketing people, they’ll tell you this is what audiences demand: Everyone supposedly wants to know exactly what is coming before buying a ticket.

Many of the moviegoers I’ve heard from have not agreed. In fact, I have even encountered people who are so tired of tell-all trailers that they will patiently wait outside the theater until it’s time for the feature to start.

"The coming attractions used to be one of the best parts of going to the movies," a friend recently told me. "Nowadays, most of them do a great job of killing any possible interest you might have in seeing the stupid movie. They show absolutely everything."  

There are a few exceptions to the rule.

Take, for instance, the trailers for director J.J. Abrams’ "Super 8," which opens June 10. Abrams produced the successful 2008 disaster movie "Cloverfield," which was sold on the strength of clips and commercials that only gave the vaguest hints of what the movie was like. You could tell something terrifying was going on in New York, but the actual menace itself remained shrouded in mystery. 

The same is true of the "Super 8" teasers. We learn that a train wreck plays a crucial role and that the notorious Area 51 (the supposed site of extraterrestrial contact) and a few teenagers are somehow involved. But that’s about it.

The strategy seems to be working: "Super 8" is building up some of the strongest buzz of any of the summer releases.

But what happens when an intriguing ad campaign turns out to be a cover up for something completely ridiculous? You might get something like the promotional push for "Night of the Lepus," the infamous science-fiction schlock-shocker that’s being shown at 3:45 a.m. Saturday on Turner Classic Movies. It’s been a staple of bad movie  marathons practically since the day it opened in 1972 — and clips from it even found their way into the cult classics "The Matrix" and "Natural Born Killers."

"Lepus" was a late addition to the oversize-creatures-on-the-rampage genre that had started in the 1950s with films such as "Them!" (featuring giant ants on the march) and "It Came From Beneath the Sea" (in which an overgrown octopus puts the squeeze on San Francisco). For those who haven’t kept up on their Latin, the villains in "Lepus" are great big bunnies that are hopping all over Arizona.

But naturally the marketing people at MGM didn’t roll out pictures of terrified people trying to avoid rampaging rabbits: They used silhouettes of gaping jaws and images of eerie eyes in the night to suggest this was going to a total terror trip from beginning to end. Instead, as you might suspect, it’s an unintentional howl, as stony-faced doctors Stuart Whitman and Janet Leigh fight off  the hippity-hopping horrors.

If you read deep into the credits on the posters, you’ll learn the movie is based on a novel by Russell Braddon called "The Year of the Angry Rabbit." So MGM can’t exactly be accused of false advertising — it’s just a textbook case of misleading marketing that fooled the unwary into seeing one of the silliest chillers ever cranked out.