Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #234 Bunny Whipped (2007)

Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.

Or you can be like four kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker, actor or television show. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career. That’s also true of the motion pictures and television projects of the late Tawny Kitaen. 

A generous patron is now paying me to watch and write about the cult animated show Batman Beyond and I’m deep into an exploration of the complete filmography of troubled former Noxzema pitch-woman Rebecca Gayheart. Oh, and I’m delving deep into the worlds of Oliver Stone and Virginia Madsen for you beautiful people as well. 

It’s rare to find a superhero movie as insultingly half-assed as the 2007 abomination Bunny Whipped. The film broadcasts its contempt for comic books, superheroes and the audience at every turn. 

Then again, it is perhaps excessively generous to even consider Bunny Whipped a superhero movie, since it can’t be bothered to do anything more than the absolute minimum. The film’s prevailing philosophy and aesthetic seems to be “Whatever” and “Who cares?” 

“Whatever” and “Who cares?” certainly describe its take on costuming, which is one baby step above simply putting protagonist in a store-bought “Superhero” Halloween costume. 

When it comes to backstory, world-building and mythology, the movie once again apathetically shrugs its shoulders in defeat and mumbles listlessly, “Whatever”, followed shortly by “Who cares?” 

Short, charmless and burdened with regrettable sideburns and unfortunate facial hair, Esteban Powell delivers a non-star-making performance as protagonist Bob Whipple, a sportswriter with a long, checkered romantic history. 

When caucasian rap superstar Cracker Jack (Fred Maske) is killed by rival Kenny Kent (Laz Alonso) for dissing him in a song Whipple is inspired to put on some brightly colored pajamas and a cloth mask and become crime-fighting vigilante The Whip. 

Most superheroes shield their true identity to protect themselves and their loved ones from evildoers. Not The Whip. He just up and tells the world that he’s underwhelming crime-fighting superhero The Whip in a lazy move that truly epitomizes the film's core philosophies of “Whatever” and “Who cares.” 

Also, The Whip is a TOTAL Mary Sue. Are we honestly supposed to believe that a diminutive professional writer who looks so flimsy a stiff wind would knock him into the next area code  would just put on a dumb costume, give himself the laziest superhero name possible and instantly acquire the skillset necessary to fight crime? 

When not fighting crime, our sub-par superhero banters flirtatiously with old girlfriend Anne (Joey Lauren Adams), an animal rights activist who has devoted her life to saving rabbits. 

Seemingly out of deference to Adams’ background as the star of the much loved romantic comedy Chasing Amy, the scenes with Adams have a decidedly different tone and feel than the rest of the film. 

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the scenes with Bob and Anne, our romantic leads, feel like warmed-over early Kevin Smith, weirdly earnest and talky. The rest of the film feels haphazardly ad-libbed and improvised by a cast burdened with a screenplay so utterly barren of laughs and inspiration that they almost can’t help but improve on it by going off book. 

Bunny Whipped aspires to Fear of a Black Hat level satire in its comic take on the glossy worlds of Hip Hop and R&B. Yet its idea of social commentary involves asking impishly what it might be like if a dorky white guy did that crazy rap fad while its depiction of a black R&B superstar as hyper-sexual, violent and evil, a true super-villain, is more likely to get kudos from the Ku Klux Klan than the NAACP. 

Of the cast, Ike Barinholtz comes closest to creating laughter in what is otherwise a barren comic desert as an arrogant reality show star who gives our underwhelming protagonist romantic advice.

Barinholtz is a real pro and a gifted improviser in a movie that often feels amateurish and incompetent despite a smattering of famous faces and names in supporting roles. These include Rebecca Gayheart as another unlikely source of advice and companionship for Bob, Miss Most Awesomely Awesome, a sash-wearing beauty pageant winner. 

It would be easier to chuckle indulgently at Bunny Whipped’s mild shenanigans if it wasn’t so pervasively nasty and crude. Bob’s first line of dialogue is “you dumb fucking blonde whore”, delivered to a framed picture of his unfaithful ex-girlfriend. 

Bunny Whipped didn’t have to go out of its way to make its perversely unappealing and non-charismatic hero even less sympathetic but it went ahead and did so anyway. 

Bob’s best friend, meanwhile, brags of his success with the ladies, “Do you know why I pull so much ass? It’s because I treat women like shit.” 

This rancid comedy ends not just with a prison rape joke but the laziest, most exhausted prison rape joke in existence: someone telling a man facing a long prison stint not to drop the soap. See, the gag is that if a prisoner were to drop the soap, they would need to bend down to pick it up, affording another prisoner an opportunity to violently sodomize them while they’re bent over. That would be painful and traumatizing and probably lead to PTSD and untold mental anguish.

That, friends, is what is meant by “Don’t drop the soap.” I can see why filmmakers of the world NEVER tire of that deathless bit of gay panic-fueled humor. 

Bunny Whipped went direct-to-video a year before 2008’s Iron Man kicked off the MCU and superhero movie renaissance. After Iron Man, superhero movies were big business, A-list blockbusters that dominate the box-office and cultural conversation. 

I’d like to think that a movie like Bunny Whipped couldn’t get made in an environment where superhero movies are revered rather than treated like an afterthought. Bunny Whipped is a terrible movie in every sense but it is particularly abysmal as a superhero movie. 

Bunny Whipped is an insult to superhero movies and superheroes in general. It’s an unseemly relic of a bygone era when slumming filmmakers put precious little energy into making superhero movies and invested even less effort into spoofing them.  

Pre-order The Joy of Trash, the Happy Place’s upcoming book about the very best of the very worst and get instant access to all of the original pieces I’m writing for them AS I write them (there are NINE so far, including Shasta McNasty and the first and second seasons of Baywatch Nights) AND, as a bonus, monthly write-ups of the first season Baywatch Nights you can’t get anywhere else (other than my Patreon feed) at https://the-joy-of-trash.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders

Missed out on the Kickstarter campaign for The Weird A-Coloring to Al/The Weird A-Coloring to Al-Colored In Edition? You’re in luck, because you can still pre-order the books, and get all manner of nifty exclusives, by pledging over at https://the-weird-a-coloring-to-al-coloring-colored-in-books.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders

and of course you can buy The Weird Accordion to Al here: https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop

AND of course you can also pledge to this site and help keep the lights on at https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace