Guilty Pleasures: Bunny Whipped
How was everyone’s Easter? Did the bunny give you quality eggs and chocolates and marshmallow peeps? In honor of that big fluffy guy I decided that the newest Guilty Pleasure should be on a film that’s hard to find in stores but available on DVD for $0.25 new. 2007’s Bunny Whipped starring Joey Lauren Adams and Esteban Powell (whoever he is).
I heard of this movie when the mom and pops video store I worked at received a copy in the mail. I’m pretty sure I was the only person to ever rent it and most likely the only person that would have enjoyed it anyway.
Released straight to DVD a year before Marvel released Kick-Ass and three years before James Gunn made the brilliant Super (but 13 years after Blankman) comes Bunny Whipped, your typical everyday man becomes superhero movie. While Kick-Ass and Super try to show the realistic aspects of becoming a superhero, Bunny Whipped just uses it as an excuse to show off some weird side-characters.
This is not a good movie. I’ll admit it, but here at Guilty Pleasures we take the good with the bad (not unlike the facts of life). Bob Whipple is a sportswriter (never shown writing a column or going to an office building) who decides to become a super hero after white rapper Cracker Jack is murdered under mysterious circumstances. He becomes The Whip. Not only is his superhero name not creative but he goes on TV repeatedly as ‘Bob Whipple AKA the Whip – Superhero/Sportswriter’. It kind of defeats the purpose of an alias.
Bob is played by Esteban Powell who is so painfully bad in this role there are points I wondered if he wrote and directed the movie as well (it’s clearly an indie film so that wouldn’t be the least bit shocking). He did not however, those titles both belong to Rafael Riera who has yet to make a follow up film.
While the filmmaking and acting is shabby and rough at best, the movie is actually entertaining and better than it had any right to be. The best humor being all the rap related battles whether it’s Cracker Jack (who is murdered in concert while singing his song I’ve Been Shot so the audience doesn’t realize he’s killed til later), the Rick James look-a-like Kenny Kent (who’s song Lonely at the Top (the wah wah wah wah song) is getting terrible reviews) or Cracker Jack’s best friend Dirty old Skank’s tribute song to Cracker’s memory ‘Tap Dat Ass’ the jokes are better than the actor’s rap skills (which admittedly isn’t hard).
Elements of the movie are trying too hard to be quirky (like the beauty model ‘Miss Most Awesomely Awesome’) it mostly hits more than it flops.
Finally much like Chasing Amy the film manages to make you fall in love with Joey Lauren Adams even though her face looks 30 years older than the rest of her and she sounds like an 80’s cartoon character. However when Joey Lauren Adams is the biggest name you have in your movie, you know you’re working on a tight budget.
