Halloween is a holiday with many recognizable mascots
ranging from Jack O’ Lanterns, to Ghosts, to Witches, and one common creature
that gets just as much marketing around this time of year is a bat. We see them
with Halloween decorations, their always on October wall-paper, bats are basically
a staple of the holiday. You’d think they’d be the perfect creatures to revolve
a horror movie around, but for some reason, they don’t have nearly as many
monster movies as spiders, snakes or sharks do. Maybe because vampires are so
popular, and regular everyday bats really aren’t as lethal as some fear them to
be. Well, in 1999 we finally got a horror movie simply titled “Bats”, it didn’t involve supernatural
bats or vampires, just plain old bats wreaking havoc where ever they go. It’s a
concept with a lot of potential, but unfortunately, if you were to call this
the modern day equivalent of Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds”, you’d be sourly mistaken.
Here’s our
set up, the government is doing lab work on bats in an effort to transform them
into ideal killing machines that can be used as weapons. But an evil doctor
wants to control the bats himself, so he releases them, and they spread their
disease to other bats across the country, thus conjuring a massive army of
rapid killers. Unfortunately for the evil doctor, the bats are getting smarter,
are no longer under his control, and begin to wreak havoc in a local town in
Texas. With the diseased bats spreading like wild fire, and the death count
building up, a local sheriff teams up with a female Zoologist that has an
expertise on Bats. Together, they battle swarms of the winged beast and try
their best to come up with a plan to stop them. Time isn’t on their side as the
military plan on nuking the town, which would only cause the bats to migrate
across North America, spreading their disease to even more bats and ultimately
over throwing the human race. Sounds pretty extreme, but it’s never as epic or
as scary as it should be.
I’ll say
this, the movie gives you exactly what you’d expect, bats attack people, and there’s
lots of it. Most movies of this sort would spend a lot of time with characters
talking, and while there is some exposition in the opening, it’s mostly just a
non-stop, action packed ride, with over the top bat attacks, explosions and
carnage. That’s all good, but there’s a noticeable lack of suspense or scares
throughout the whole film. Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds” admittedly had a lot of boring conversations with
characters that we didn’t care for, but it helped build up the suspense, and it
made the action all the more thrilling.
“The
Birds” also had a lot more mystery and kept the audience guessing, because we
never knew what was causing the birds to act so crazy, and that made the whole
situation come off as more terrifying. By contrast, “Bats” hits us over the head with plot exposition right from the
beginning, which spoils all the tension, and having a generic evil doctor as
the cause behind the killer bats is beyond stupid-clichéd. Also with so many
action scenes, the movie never takes the time to establish an eerie atmosphere,
or even do anything that creepy with its concept, which just makes it feel like
wasted potential. Whenever the movie does aim for something creepy, it results
in unintentional comedy. Now there is one effectively creepy moment with a bat
crawling into a babies cradle, but it only lasts for a second or two before the
situation is completely dropped. There’s also lots of stupid jump scares that
you can see coming from a mile away.
Dina Meyer is
our star, playing the lead Zoologist, and while none of the actors give
outstanding performances, she at least holds her own in the film. Before this movie,
she was fighting off giant bugs in “Starship
Troopers”, and later she’d star in “Parana
3D”. Admittedly she has a fairly commanding screen presence, delivers the
best performance she can with what little she has to work with, and she’s naturally
beautiful without being overly sexualized. Lou Diamond Phillips from “The Big Hit” plays the local sheriff,
and he has a harder time working with a bad script, resulting in a rather boring character. Then there’s a comedic side character played by Leon, who I remember
best as one of the villains from “Cliffhanger”.
He has his moments, but he has just as many stupid scenes and occasionally poor
delivery on his lines. The evil doctor is as boring and generic as they get,
but worse is that he’s played by Bob Gunton who’s a talented actor and deserves
better than this. I’ll always remember him best as the evil prison Warden from
“The Shawshank Redemption”. To be
fair, I don’t think anyone was expecting really great characters to come from a
film of this sort, but in all honestly, I’ve seen much worse, even if their
just there to be victims to the bats when they strike.
The bat
attacks themselves are a mixed bag. They come in a nice variety and do
something different with each encounter, which is great. There’s a scene is
which our hero’s are all boarded up in a school while the bats are trying to
brake in. It’s good stuff and has no shortage of overblown, electrical
explosions and fireworks. The best scene of all is when the bats launch an all
out attack on the town, resulting in lots of destruction, vehicles crashing
into buildings, and people fighting them off with shot guns and other weapons.
There’s a moment in which our female heroin is trapped in a glass ticket box,
which is a nice little tribute to the classic phone booth scene from “The Birds”. While it’s all exciting and
bombastic, the action scenes themselves are shot terribly. The shaky camera is
probably the worst I’ve ever seen, and the editing is just a random mess of
sped up imagery which makes it impossible to tell what your even looking at.
I will say that
the bat effects are very amusing. The swarms of them are mostly CGI, but there
are occasionally some real bats, and there’s lots of animatronics and puppets
for the individual bats, which are fairly cool. The bat designs are kind of
unique too, close up’s of their face make them look like savage dogs with rabies.
Their eye’s also glow yellow, which is a silly but a welcome edition. The movie
does have some good visuals, for example I love the shots of the bat swam
silhouetted against the full moon. One really stupid gimmick in this movie is
that the title is always spelt upside down, it’s on the poster and even the
opening title screen is upside down. I remember the first time I saw the
poster, I thought the title was “STAB”, but no it’s just “BATS” upside down,
which is ridiculous. We never even see a bat hanging upside down in the film,
their always flying or crawling on all fours, so what were they thinking?
At the end, our
hero’s discover that all the bats are roosting in a mine. A plan is soon
orchestrated to drop a freezing devise underground, which will kill all the
bats. It may sound a little anti-climactic, but it at least leads to a somewhat
exciting action scene in which our team is chased down throughout the mines and
have to escape before it gets sealed or nuked by the military. There’s a funny
little closing scene in which it looks like one bat escaped, only for it to get
squashed by a car before it can fly away. Unfortunately, that didn’t stop the
Sci-Fi channel from releasing a sequel in 2007 titled “Bats: Human Harvest”, I didn’t watch it, but it looked really bad,
which I’m sure it was.
Over the years, “Bats” has become one of those cult
favorite films, and while I certainly wouldn’t call this a good film, I can see
the appeal some may have with it. The movie plays less like a horror and more
like an unintentional comedy. Personally, this film has always been kind of a
“guilty pleasure”, I know it’s all around a bad movie, but I can’t help but
enjoy it on some level. I guise I’m just easy to please when it comes to cheesy
B monster movies. I’d say it’s better than the average animal attack film, but
I’d only recommend it to fans of the genera. If you want a really good movie
with some real scares, watch “The Birds”
instead, but if a mindless creature feature with non-stop action is more up
your ally, then “Bats” probably
won’t disappoint.
Thanks for reading my review of the 1999 creature feature “Bats” ... and continue to enjoy the movies you Love!
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