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Bats are scary. Even though they are gentle, passive creatures that will only bite in self-defense if they are picked up and handled, bats still have a bad reputation. Their presence is an indicator of a healthy ecosystem. They are good for the rainforest, they eat annoying insects and their rate of rabies infection isn't more than any other species (about 1 in 1,000). But try rationalizing this to a person that has a bat swooping around their attic at night and you are likely to find yourself trampled by said person.
In Bats, the first offering from new Hollywood player Destination Films, the director of Carnosaur 2 (Louis Morneau) is teamed with Gladiator screenwriter John Logan to make one of the worst films of the year, if not the entire decade. It's not scary. In fact, that Bugs Bunny cartoon with the vampire that turns into a half-man/half-bat after hearing the words `Hocus Cadabra' was scarier. The filmmakers and actors think they're making an Oscar contender, while they should be playing everything with a sarcastic edge – like in Lake Placid.
Bats takes place in Gallup, Texas, and in the first scene we watch the token young couple attacked by killer bats that claw their way through the ragtop car roof and chomp on the teens' jugulars. Flash to the Arizona desert, where Sheila Casper (Dina Meyer, Starship Troopers), a wildlife zoologist with a specialty in Chiroptera, is in a cave studying docile bats with her idiotic sidekick Jimmy (León, OZ). A chopper from the Center for Disease Control lands nearby and whisks the two off to Gallup to help them investigate the grisly deaths.
As it turns out, these bloodthirsty bats were actually a decade-long government experiment that took Flying Foxes – an Indonesian bat with a six-foot wingspan – and genetically increased their natural intelligence, developed their ability to work as a team, as well as making them aggressive and carnivorous. Two of these killing machines have escaped and infected the entire bat population of Gallup. Their creator, Dr. McCabe (Bob Gunton, Patch Adams), is one of the lamest evil scientists in the history of movie bad guys.
Together with local Sheriff Emmett Kimsey (Lou Diamond Phillips, I Lost my Wife to Melissa Etheridge), Casper and the bat-phobic Jimmy brainlessly try to think of ways of stopping the bats from escalating their nightly attacks on the town. Their big idea is to hole up in the school, covering each door and window with electrified chain-link fencing, despite the fact that the bats were able to squeeze through a car's ventilation system in an earlier scene. How would a chain-link fence be any more protective?
Kimsey, Casper and Jimmy proceed to an abandoned mine, where the throngs of bats have congregated. The Army is trying to trap them in the mine and annihilate them using a large refrigeration device, since cold temperatures are lethal to the winged critters. But the bats wipe out the Army, too, leaving Kimsey and Casper to venture into the mine wearing what resembles scuba gear. This, despite knowing that the bats gnawed their way through a ragtop car roof.
Kimsey, in all of the wisdom his shallow character can muster, turns and fires a pistol at the approaching bats as he flees the mine. There are millions of them - what does he think a few bullets would do? This is after he and Casper were chest-deep in a river of bat guano and he decided to light a flare. Maybe I don't know a lot about bats or the flammability of their guano, but I would have second and third thoughts about introducing flame to large amounts of the dung of any animal. And speaking of bat knowledge, aren't they supposed to be blind? On several occasions, the director offers a view from the perspective of a bat, which is apparently red-hued and slanty.
Bats is a terrible mess when it should be a tongue-in-cheek mockery of the genre. The writer's idea of intentional laughs are León's awful one-liners that fall as flat as Meyer's tummy. He's a Chris Tucker wannabe; a black Shaggy without the sidekick, left to lifelessly shout dumb stuff like, `I don't like the sound of that,' `I hate this shit' and the inevitably original `Damn.' Hopefully, Logan's next script – Oliver Stone's Christmas football pic Any Given Sunday – will be a bit crisper. Morneau's action sequences are choppy and tough to make out, and although the disgusting bats resemble a certain senior Senator from North Carolina, they fail to terrify.
1:30 - PG-13 for bat attacks and adult language
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