Ouch! Bats Bites

Take a world-weary small town sheriff, add a zoologist who wears tank tops and looks like an Herbal Essence ad, one mad scientist and a few trillion mean, carnivorous bats, and you have the perfect Halloween smash hit on your hands. It's a guaranteed success. Right? At least that's what the producers of Destination Films appear to have believed when they made Bats, their latest piece of brain candy. But the singular experience that is Bats cannot be described this easily.

As a self-proclaimed "wildlife zoologist" specializing in chiroptera (which she is careful to explain means "bats"), Dina Meyer's Dr. Sheila Casper makes one believe that it is in fact possible to receive a doctorate via mail order. Meyer (of Starship Troopers fame) is laughable as a bat-loving researcher. In one of the film's most priceless exchanges, Casper tells Sheriff Emmett Kimsey (Lou Diamond Phillips) "I could never kill a bat" because it "would go against everything that I've come to believe in." This attitude lasts until one of the little darlings gets caught in her hair. The dear, sweet bat then receives a home-style lobotomy from the good doctor. Hmm...

Dr. Kasper and her sassy sidekick, Jimmy (Leon) are drawn to the clichd, sleepy town of Gallup, Texas by, surprise, surprise... a string of "strange" bat attacks! Casper's role in the investigation apparently consists of identifying a bat tooth found in one of the bodies. According to the Centers for Disease Control official who recruits Kasper they need her because she is "the best." Just what is she the best at? Well, apparently at delivering a series of scientific platitudes in a loud voice without once changing her facial expression.

The brilliant Dr. Casper refuses to believe that bats are responsible for any of the bizarre attacks on humans and animals in the area of Gallup. She instead attempts to explain them away as part of some anti-bat conspiracy hoax. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, Dr. Kasper really does love her bats. A whole lot. Only when she encounters government scientist Dr. Alexander McCabe (Bob Gunton), does she realize that the bats in Gallup are far from normal (a fact which is clear to the audience within the first five minutes of the movie, from their claymation appearance and vicious teamwork). The government has engineered these bats using a host-specific virus. These bats are meaner, much, much smarter than normal bats, and they are, to quote McCabe, "killing machines." God help us all. Precisely why these bats have been created and why they have been released on an unsuspecting populace are not questions that Bats troubles to answer. What Bats is primarily concerned with is just what the title would imply. Bats. Big, ugly, gremlin look-a-like, blood-sucking bats. Bats going on a rampage in Gallup during a nocturnal feeding frenzy. Bats attacking a truck. Bats attacking a fortified high school that houses our daring protagonists. Bats in caves. Bats in mine shafts. And it only gets more creative.

The plot of the film is largely incidental. It appears pieced-together haphazardly, as though the script were written after the bat attack scenes were filmed, to add human faces a the cast of winged mammals. Although compared to the wooden performances of Lou Diamond Phillips and Dina Meyer, the bats are surprisingly human. Bats is so painfully unaware of its own ridiculousness that it qualifies for a place in the annals of camp classics.Yet, there is nothing tongue-in-cheek about this film. It is marketed as a thriller, in the tradition of Hitchcock's classic The Birds. Bats totally lacks the sensitivity of Hitchcock's thriller. In fact, this movie makes one yearn for the emotional depth of Child's Play and the subtlety of Moe, Curly, Larry or even Shemp.

The film gives its human characters only cursory recognition. They are thinly veiled stereotypes giving stereotyped reactions in scenes that have been written a thousand times before, in a thousand better ways. The bats produce only laughter rather than gasps of fear as they crawl gargoyle-like across the screen. Casper and Kimsey are flat and undeveloped. In fact, the sole target audience that will not be disappointed by Bats would appear to be the masochists. Although quite honestly, the same affect could be achieved by banging one's head against the wall for an hour and a half, and it would be far less expensive. For after viewing the movie whose posters claimed it would "suck you dry," this reviewer merely found herself drained.