Bats

What is all the commotion about with regard to this movie? So many people seem genuinely ticked off at it....and I am just curious about their expectations before seeing it. My expectations were realistic...meaning I didn't expect much, nor was I disappointed in my expectations. This film is bad, yet in a way fairly entertaining. Like many films of its ilk it is not trying to be taken too seriously. We can tell this by the compact acting styles, the huge loopholes in plot, and the horrendous dialogue. None of the actors are particularly good. The CGI effects are dismal, and when the bats attack close-up one cannot see anything in the blurred action. Watching it I almost felt it looked a bit like Gremlins, only to be taken seriously and without the professionalism of all concerned in that film. On the other hand, there are many ways your time could be used less effectively...personally I like watching bad movies....especially a bad movie you can sit through and not be bored out of your mind with. Bats is just that ...a bad movie you can sit through.

I really liked this movie. Of course, if you're cynical, you might be better off not going to see this. Just stick with whatever movie you saw a long time ago that you think is better than everything now a days. On the other hand, if you really like movies for what they are, you'll probably have fun watching this movie. Everybody in the audience I was in seemed to have a great time watching this as did I. The dialogue was funny and not ALL that predictable. The acting was not bad, it was actually pretty good. I really liked Dina Meyer in this (although she looked better with curly hair). Anyways, this movie will be liked by kids and anyone who goes to the movies as a form ENTERTAINMENT. I'll probably see this once more and get it when it comes out on DVD. Don't let ME influence you, though. You should always make up your own mind. (8/10).

This is not a very good movie. If I had seen it at a theater, I would have felt ripped off, certainly. But at home, I watched it with an undemanding mood, and with the feeling this was a basic update of a low budget animal-attacking movie of the '70s. Seeing it that way, the movie was good enough to pass the time. No more, but I wasn't bored.

Certainly, there's a lot of the movie that's dumb. Some of the puppets and computer generated effects look really bad. The black character is only there for humor, and his treatment is somewhat offensive. Lou Diamond Phillips can't act. Sometimes you can't tell what's going on with all the close-ups of flapping wings and bad editing.

There are a few good things. Some of the cliches I was expecting actually didn't happen. (For one thing, the authorities are quick to the danger for once.) The cinematography is excellent, and occasionally the movie has a "big" feeling that makes it look more expensive that its $6.5 million budget.

So if you like B movies, are feeling undemanding, and can see it cheaply or for free, you might want to give it a try.

Bats, a film that should have premiered on the Science Fiction channel on cable, somehow got a theatrical release. If it had been made fifty years earlier I can definitely see Boris Karloff or Bela Lugosi in the part that Bob Gunton plays as the mad scientist.

The scariest thing about Bats is not the creatures themselves although they are the ugliest looking things this side of the Black Scorpion. The scariest part of the film was Bob Gunton's portrayal of the mad scientist who created this race of killer omnivirous Bats. He's identified as working for the Center For Disease Control. I was watching this figuring out how this creep got government clearance.

Yet Gunton is the most enjoyable thing in this film. And you got to love the fact that he had all these government facilities to work with, he's not hidden away in some laboratory in an old castle the way Karloff and Lugosi used to be. He's bred this race of flying fox bats from Indonesia which are aggressive to begin with and they've taken up residence in a bat cavern in Lou Diamond Phillips's county where he's the sheriff.

After several suspicious deaths with mutilation, the cause is identified and zoologists Dina Meyer and Leon Robinson are brought in to clean out the bat cave. If you care about how and if they do it by all means watch the film and the hint is, think blob.

Bats will never go down as a great science fiction classic, but it does have a certain campiness to it. And Gunton is a hoot.

Bats is a very generic late-'90s killer animal flick that follows most of the genre rules to the letter. All of the expected characters are present and correct—untrustworthy government scientist, brave local sheriff, doomed-to-die deputy, dedicated (and sexy) animal expert, wise-cracking sidekick—and the plot develops in an extremely predictable manner, opening with young couple alone in the dark falling victim to the bats, before introducing a whole townful of potential victims, and climaxing with our brave heroes risking their lives in a showdown against the deadly critters.

It all gets very silly at times, with perhaps the most unbelievable scene being the securing and electrification of a whole school by just four people in the space of a few hours, but it still proves to be quite a bit of fun, director Louis Morneau keeping the action moving at such a swift pace that such nonsense is fairly easy to forgive (unlike the director's tendency to 'skew', stretch and blur the image during the frenzied bat attacks, which I found bloody irritating).

What really helps to elevate this formulaic nonsense to slightly-above-average are the solid cast and some fairly decent special effects. Dina Meyer (of Starship Troopers fame) and Lou Diamond Phillips make for a likable protagonists, and Leon is far less objectionable as 'token comedy relief black guy' than one might expect. As for the bats, they're a mixture of more than reasonable CGI and nifty puppetry from KNB; my only gripe, FX-wise, is a lack of splatter—a bit more gore would have been very welcome.