There are so few Easter set horror films that it makes it all the more depressing that what few there are, are mostly awful. Killer Easter bunnies is a recurring theme, just as Krampus has become a regular of Christmas themes low budget nonsense. Beaster Day: Here Comes Peter Cottenhell (also released as The Beast Bunny!) is like too many low budget horrors – it’s high on ambition but falls woefully short in almost every other department and so plays the whole thing for laughs. And as is often the case, writer/director John Bacchus (crediting himself as Snygg Brothers for some reason – possibly shame) is no undiscovered comic genius.

There’s no real plot as such – a giant killer rabbit, the origins of which are never explained, lurks in the woods while various people, mainly women having trouble keeping their tops on (nudity has rarely been this gratuitous), wander through the same forest meeting grisly ends. From time to time, annoyingly intense dog catcher Doug (Peter Sullivan) and reluctant new recruit, wannabe poet-actor-artist Brenda (Marisol Custodio), op up on the trail of nothing in particular. Meanwhile a permanently stoned slacker mayor (John Paul Fedele) refuses to take things seriously and the bodies continue piling up (though they clearly couldn’t afford the Amish massacre they only allude to). It doesn’t make a lick of sense and probably wasn’t supposed to.

As giant killer rabbit films go, this one makes even the notoriously hopeless Night of the Lepus (1972) look good. Non-descript characters fill up the dead spits between bunny attacks and when it does turn up, it’s a scabby looking optically enlarged marionette badly green-screened behind over-acting non-performers. It really is one of the shoddiest screen monsters you’ll ever see and even it was meant to be intentional, the “joke” wears thin very quickly indeed.

The gory special effects are occasionally impressive though purists will balk at the fact that they’re mostly CGI, but they are plentiful which should keep the gore hounds happy. Bacchus plunders the same bag of camera tricks that Sam Raimi had emptied decades before (Raimi did it so much better and he had no money either) to very little effect and only if you’ve never seen a comedy film before are you likely to find it all amusing. And to add insult to injury, the monster isn’t even the Easter bunny – or possibly it is, no-one questions where it cm from or hat it is until literally the last second by which time we’ve lost any interest in it at all.

Beaster Day: Here Comes Peter Cottenhell (the rabbit is never referred to by name) is a better-than-averagely resource amateur film, made with plenty of enthusiasm but very little sign of talent. There are far better horror comedies out there to keep you entertained – An American Werewolf in London (1981), Brain Dead/Dead Alive (1992), Shaun of the Dead (2004), Tucker and Dale vs Evil (2010), What We Do in the Shadows (2014) et al. Why would you want to suffer through this nonsense when much funnier films like that are out there?

We are, apparently, supposed to accept that the film is deliberately bad and that, in itself, is supposed to be enough to convince us to watch it. But just as reading a badly written novel or listening to out of time and out of tune music is no fun at all, where’s the pleasure in putting yourself through hall this? At a time when so many great films are readily available, it’s hard to fathom why we should waste 90 minutes of our lives on a film that the makers themselves couldn’t be bothered to make as well as they could.