Bats: guanomania
In Cujo there was one bat, and a handful of people died. Now imagine there are thousands of bats. Net result? Even more people die. But now of course the bats are digital, and--in close-up--bear some serious family resemblance to the little 'demons' in The Gate. Which is part of the fun: horror is far and away the most self-referential of the genres. It has to be. If it doesn't conscientiously acknowledge its precursors, we assume that it's presuming to exist in a vacuum, to be not derivative in spite of a horror section that sprawls over half the video store. It's about respect, and Bats dutifully shows it, even going so far as to place Nosferatu on the marquee and work it into the background over and over.
As for the story, it's comfortably familiar: Mad Scientist being punished for hubris, for tampering with nature, for doing to some bats what the scientists in Deep Blue Sea did to their sharks--making them into killing machines, then 'accidentally' releasing them. Next of course you have to assemble the crew, gather all the specialists (Lake Placid, etc), see how they function together, all that. And of course a staple of all this is that the Mad Scientist doesn't want his creation killed, in spite of the fact that it so obviously needs to be killed. None of this is new. Neither is the role of Sheriff Kimsey (Lou Diamond Phillips), the token authority figure who quickly becomes central to everything. Ben Affleck in Phantoms, Roy Scheider in Jaws, the list goes on.
More or less, Bats is an airborne Arachnophobia, even down to the 'Typhoid Mary' spider/bat, who has to die in a final grudge match in order for the bats/spiders to be 'really' beaten. Or, looking at it from the vampire-angle, the head vampire has to die, be it at the hands of Corey Haim and Co. or Sheriff Kimsey and his ragtag crew: bat-guru Sheila Caspar (Dina Meyer; and yes, 'Caspar,' this close to Halloween) and her comical side-kick Jimmy (Leon), who single-handedly provides half the fun of Bats.
The other half is of course the bats (Chiroptera) themselves, that Gremlin-like supply of bats. The same bats who are both driven to kill by hunger and rarely bother to stop and eat any of their victims. But so be it. Those victims do tend to die fairly graphically, and that's what we really want, after all. So far, all of this meets the admittedly low criterions Bats sets for itself. But then it goes a little far, (guilty of hubris itself, yes) tries to draw from one source too many: Outbreak. Yes, the 'virus' these bats are carrying will soon paint most of a computer simulation of North America red. Meaning Kimsey and Co. aren't just trying to save their small corner of the world (from the bats and the military), but the world itself. Which does a lot to defeat the isolation which is so vital to horror. They even have radio and modem uplinks to the outside world, and thus are able to order supplies, when what would work better is to see them defeat the bats all by themselves. That's the kind of stuff that reinforces our sense of self-worth, as if we might have done the same thing, given the same circumstances. Still, however, and in spite of all the outside help, properly killing all these bats isn't quite a cakewalk, although we know all along it's more or less an inevitability. The question is just how, and, even if Bats doesn't hide that quite as well as, say, Mimic does, it still manages to satisfy. It is the season for bats, after all. We can forgive the small things, so long as the none of the conventions are ignored. Bats, comprehensively derivative as it is, ignores not a single one.
(c) 1999 Stephen Graham Jones
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