Bats

Review by Jason Donner

Ever since the rather perplexing success of Anaconda, a slew of man-eating tongue-in-cheek monster movies have come out all with the hopes of being the Anaconda of that year. It was the goal of Lake Placid and it's the goal of Bats... Now, Anaconda might have been bad.... Lake Placid may have been bad... but you ain't seen bad until you've seen Bats.

The sleepy little town of Gallop, Texas wakes up a little when people and livestock start getting eaten alive by killer bats... yes, you heard me... killer bats. Enter the brainy little lady scientist to fix it all... things go south and hijinks, hilarity, and a half-assed movie follows.

This movie has it all... stereotypical dumb Texans, the comic relief token black guy, the blonde scientist (Dina Myer) who is an expert despite the fact that she's dumb as a brick, a boneheaded military that won't listen to anyone... especially not the experts they called in the first place, the soft spoken yet quietly evil old scientist, and the well-known, yet not quite famous leading man (Lou Diamond Phillips).

Think Anaconda meets Gremlins meets The Birds meets Frankenstein meets La Bamba.

Bats is a movie that is just plain stupid. I mean it... movie's don't get no dumber than this! Picture the following dialogue that actually took place in the movie:

"You mutated bats into carnivores? Why?"

"I'm a scientist. That's what we do."

I'm not kidding folks, this is the hokiest movie I've ever seen! The dialogue is horrible! It's atrocious! This movie is so bad that it is beneath Mystery Science Theater 3000! Forget all the talk you've heard about this movie being "so bad it's good"... this movie is so bad it's pathetic! I hated this movie! I hated it! I hated it! I hated it! This is a paint-by-numbers movie! This is a movie made on a low budget to solely attract the people curious enough to see a movie about man-eating bats!

I would rather get eaten by bats than watch this stupid movie again!

...there's always going to be man-eating monster movies trying to become the Anaconda of 1999..., 2000..., 2001..., 2002, ect... But answer me this... Do we really need another Anaconda? Lordy, Lordy, no!