Bats

These are bald faced, large fanged, saliva dripping gremlin like creatures that fly. Sometimes they alarmingly change size, or at least their wings do, but that’s not because they’re supernatural, it’s just bad, incompetent film making.

Bats is abysmal. You’ll know that from the first time you see Lou Diamond (Young Guns) Phillips doing the Texan sheriff, big white hat, huge cigar thing. Groan.

Bats have started munching on the locals of Gallup Texas, of course starting with a couple of spooning teenagers in their car. Another problem. Did the car have a soft top, or did those bats actually rip their way through a metal car roof? If they did, then why couldn’t they do the same sort of thing for the rest of the movie.

We’re then introduced to the classic, comically bad, mad professor bit and we might start to wonder whether Bats might be in the so bad its good, Ed Wood territory.

But I can’t see that happening. Not in this decade anyway. What really let the film down was the bats themselves which often were laughable as they quivered and dribbled, and dwelled and then attacked. But lets not forget the interminable camera shakes and swoops as we followed the action from the bat’s point of view, which meant we didn’t see anything.

The Army gets called in. And then the army just sort of leaves! The black side kick does his hootenanny thing, the Texas sheriff sheriffs on and the pretty female bat expert Dina Meyer (Starship Troopers) gets down to a Ripley tanktop, and stops there thank God. I don’t think I could have stood any more skin.

Hitchcock’s The Birds came to my desperate mind, as does Aliens at times, but then thankfully the concept of refrigeration was introduced into Bats. Apparently like bees, coolness will work with bats, so the good folk of Gallup with the help of the pretty bat woman, the Texas sheriff and the jive talking black man decide to cool the vicious blighters.

Salvation! I was reminded of the made for TV The Savage Bees (1976) where a vicious swarm is lead into a sports stadium while clustered on a Volkswagon beetle. The bees were then calmed with air conditioning. Savage Bees was a far better film than Bats.