Why can’t folks just enjoy cheesy B movies for what they are? I wrote about one of my favorites in a 2012 post.
Okay, a confession: of all the things that creep, crawl, fly, slither, swim, burrow, or move around by means of propulsion other than two legs, the ones that weird me out more than anything else are—bats.
Go figure. It’s not like we had a barn next to the South Bronx tenement in which I grew up, or caves nearby—just subway tunnels and sewers. Mostly we had mice, and cockroaches the size of hubcaps, and rats as big as Clydesdales. And yeah, all of the aforementioned gross me out to this day.
But bats? I don’t know, they just look freaking weird and nasty. So just as I enjoy seeing bugs get squished in films such as Mimic and Starship Troopers, so do I like the bat-kill in the 1999 bomb, Bats.
Did I say bomb? Well, according to IMDb Bats actually made some money, much of which probably had to do with its low budget. But you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who actually liked it—except for me. (My bride has often accused me of being easily entertained; she’s right, you know. I even liked Nightwing.) Just take a trip around the Internet and look at the vile adjectives used in reviewing this film. So yeah, this definitely qualifies as a guilty pleasure, as in, “Why the heck would you want to watch that!?”
Weird and nasty looking? Am I right?
The plot is simple, the cast serviceable. Dina Meyer plays Dr. Sheila Casper, a zoologist specializing in the study of bats. (She also played in Starship Troopers; hmm…) When livestock, and then a couple of teens, are killed by bats near a small Texas town, Sheila and her assistant, Jimmy (Leon) are flown there by the CDC to help Sheriff Emmett Kimsey (Lou Diamond Phillips) hunt them down. Creepy Dr. McCabe (Bob Gunton) is along for the ride, but only to hinder them, because he’s the dude who developed the two super-intelligent bats that lead the whole roost, and to him, they’re his babies.
Dina Meyer
On their first excursion, Sheila and Emmett (there’s a definite attraction here) survive an attack and manage to tag a soldier bat in order to locate the roost. But the smart bats know this, and they kill the soldier bat before it can return. Now the smart folks start to “get it.” They figure that the town will be attacked next, and they head back to warn everyone—but too late. The gazillion bats cause a whole lot of death and destruction in Gallup, Texas before the two smart bats lead them off.
Sheila and the others hole up in the school, where Jimmy, a techie, uses satellite imagery to pinpoint the bat roost, an old mine. The military, of course, wants to blow it all to hell, but Sheila warns that this would scatter the bats and make the situation worse. She convinces them to deliver a huge cooling unit to the mine and lower it down. Seems that the bats hibernate at 40°, and at 32° they die. The military manages to get the unit in before the bats attack them, killing everyone. Then, they head for the school, where nasty Dr. McCabe has summoned them to stop Sheila and the others. They survive the attack—barely—and then the asshole goes outside to snuggle with his babies. Oh yeah, they snuggle all right…
Jimmy, Sheila, and Sheriff Emmett are about to take on the whole roost.
So now Sheila, Emmett, and Jimmy head for the mine, where they learn that the military is an hour away from bombing the place all to hell. No more Mr. Nice Guy, since their own people have been killed. Now, she and Emmett have little time left to go down into the mine, turn on the coolant, get back to the surface and convince the military that all is well and that they should turn the bombers around.
’Nuff said. I won’t give away the denouement, though it is exciting, disgusting, fun—and totally not believable, but who cares? I can think of far less productive ways to spend ninety-one minutes than watching Bats. Enjoy.