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 and cause nightmares 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. 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 wife 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!?”
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 next be attacked, 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…
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.
SWORDS & SPECTERS: Now that my adventure fantasy novel, The Sorcerer of Mesharra (Ro-Lan: Book Three) has been reissued, I’m going to wait a while before doing the fourth book, which was originally titled, The Demons of Zammar. After Zebra Books published the series back in the eighties, I caught a lot of flak for not ending the main thread of the story—the quest of Roland 
Summers and his friends to destroy Ras-ek Varano, the evil Master of Boranga. Hey, blame the publisher, not me! Anyway, when I revise Book Four later this year or early 2013, who knows…?
Perhaps you’ve had one too many bat containing daydreams (or daymares)…? 😉 I think bats are sweet when glassed in at the zoo. Flying around in the black of night, where they could collide with my head, not so much.
Their sonar keeps them from bumping into things. If they collide with your head, you may be under attack…gee, just like in the movie! 🙂
And no batty daydreams. The bats come well into the night, when I’m asleep… 🙂 🙂
Ah… I wish I’d known that back in my youth. If I have bat-mares tonight, you’ll hear about them first! 😉
Hey Mike. Great post.
My house is actually home to several hundred bats. My poor old house has no sub-roofing, so everytime a piece of the old slate roof comes up a bit, they have easy access. And, being that the house is old, they find their way into the house from time to time.
I take my handy-dandy butterfly net, and catch the little guys. I’ve held quit a few (though with gloves) and they really are cool little animals. Once they calm down, they start to preen themselves, and will actually tolerate being petted. They won’t bite unless provoked, and typically, if they have rabies, they die quickly.
I love bats, though I wish they would find a new place to live.
You obviously don’t live in the South Bronx, my friend. 🙂 It’s probably the horror writer in me–I’ve read too many vampire stories, watched too many vampire and evil bat movies. One of my writers sent me a photo of little baby bats wrapped in blankies. Cute, I gotta admit. Still…
Anyway, thanks for sharing your neat story and offering a different perspective.
Guilty of the baby bats picture. If you think the fuzzy little guys are cute wrapped in blankies, you should see the one where they have pacifiers in their mouths. I kid you not. Search Google for “baby bats in blankets” if you want to see them.
While I do enjoy (bad) “evil bat” movies like this one, I am so jealous of Geminye getting to hold them. That would be amazing. If I lived in Australia, I would be one of the volunteers who raises orphaned bats. But that much bat poop in the attic…
I’ve seen “Bats” at least once, all the way through, and various parts on different occasions. Harmless fun.
But just for you, Mike, I could probably dig up the documentary I saw a while ago on vampire bats. You could be really creeped out by seeing them dine on chickens and cows (only without the BBQ first). Then, if you dare, you could watch while they stalk on leathery wings, up the bodies of their sleeping victims, as they go for the main course…human blood. They say you don’t even feel their razor-sharp bite.
OK, fine. Watching them lap up the blood with their tiny little tongue is kinda cute. I know, it’s just me.
Ah, you’ve restored my faith in the reality of the fact that they scare the crap out of me! I feel much better. 🙂
Glad to be of service, if you want to be scared of bats. 🙂 But you’re safe from vampires as long as you don’t live in Central or South America. Even then, as long as you’re not a chicken, in the literal sense, they won’t do you much harm. Unless they carry rabies, which most of them don’t.
That still didn’t stop me from making sure the covers were up around my neck before going to sleep, as a child, so that Dracula couldn’t bite me in my sleep. After all, he couldn’t nosh on what he couldn’t see, right? (I love the “logic” of children.)
However, if you don’t like bugs (a la “Starship Troopers”, a guilty pleasure of mine) you would know that bats are your friend. In fact, really, really good friends! Now that mosquitoes have carried West Nile Virus to my area, I wish we had a lot more bats around here to eat them. What scares me now is a mosquito bite.
But one of the most magnificent sights I’ve seen was in Las Vegas, at the Luxor Hotel. You know, that’s the black pyramid on the south end of the strip. At night, they have a light shining from the apex, up into the sky, that is so bright it can be seen from the space station. Well, that incredible light attracts millions of insects. And insects attract bats. My most memorable evening in L.V. wasn’t at an exorbitantly expensive show or on a casino floor. It was when my husband and I stood on the sidewalk by the Luxor watching a flock of bats, illuminated by that amazing light, as they had dinner, making pass after pass through the literal fog of bugs. Able to turn on a dime, they were graceful and agile, not creepy.