Okay, here's the deal. If there's a holiday I hate and love at the same time, it has to be Halloween. I love the haunted houses; I love the trick-or-treating kids, all that stuff is wonderful. There's nothing I'd rather do than make the old homeplace a "driveway of terror" for the Carver Point tykes. I make it my personal goal to absolutely scare the Milk Duds out of any kids that trick or treat my way. If they make it to the front door without soiling their Pokemon costume, they get a nice double handful of goodies, one of which is always a free ticket to the dodecaplex. It's worth the fear, they know it and I know it, but the challenge is always there. If I hear the doorbell ring, I know that kid earned his Snickers Fun Bar.
But, as is always the case, with the good must come the bad. And, with all the good stuff that makes Halloween cool, there always has to be some bonehead that decides to make a horror film to gather in some cheap bucks from the spooky set. They're usually sloppily done, the name star is someone who has been naked in some magazine, or is at the tail end of a run of stardom and is looking for anything to get some press time.
Well, guess what....
There's a new horror movie out called Bats. I can't write it like I'm supposed to, because one of the neat-o tricks the studio did for an ad campaign was to make the title hang upside down in all the ads, like a bat. Wow! Spend money on that idea, did you? I hope so, 'cause didn't nobody spent anything else to make this miserable piece of cow candy worth sitting through.
How's this for a plot? The little town of Gallup, Texas has been overrun with bats. Jillions of bats. And it's up to local sheriff Lou Diamond Phillips (La Bamba) to do something. So what does he do? He teams up with a very sexy bat specialist (like that's the least believable thing in this thing) played by Dina Meyer. She has a stereotypical smart-ass assistant (Leon), and there is, of course, a slimy other scientist, played by Bob Gunton, who may or may not be exactly what he seems. Wanna guess?
Attention, shoppers. Head for the check-out aisle with your final purchases. Plot-Mart is closed. What else do we get for our hard-earned presidential flash cards? We get bats. We get CGI bat effects, we get details about bats, their droppings, their habitats, their underwear sizes. That's all there is!
Bats fly around and kill folks, destroy stuff, and the people all make faces like the Japanese actors in those Godzilla movies. It's like watching MST3K spoof one of those horrible movies, but there's no silhouettes in the corner making you laugh. That job is handled nicely, thank you, by this cast of pork butts. Yes, friends, not only do bats like fruit and blood and hanging upside down, they are also partial to Grade A Ham, and there's enough here to make an emergency call for ten gallons of red-eye gravy. The smokehouse is empty, and all the musty smells of dried pig parts reek through the screen.
And you can only keep asking yourself, "Why?"
Not why the movie got made. That's an inevitability of the season. I want to know why anyone with any degree of talent agreed to do this thing! Bob Gunton was the warden in The Shawshank Redemption. He played a masterful villain there, all quiet and smirky, brimming with nasty. Despite his silly one name thing, León has done some pretty good work, especially in The Five Heartbeats and the TV movie bio of the Temptations. Dina Meyer has been in some high-profile flicks (Starship Troopers) and had a funny run as Joey's actress girlfriend on "Friends". And Lou Diamond Phillips??? The man nominated for a Tony Award from his performance in The King and I on Broadway??? This is how you follow that role? Why didn't you just shoot yourself in the foot and thread a ribbon through the hole? It would've been prettier than this mess!
I think the thing that offends me the most about this ziploc bag of stool samples is the fact they so desperatley tried to pawn this off as some modern version of Hitchcock's The Birds. I don't know whose idea that little brainstorm came from, but to compare this drek to Hitchcock only makes it all the more laughable. At least we could care about the characters in The Birds. Here, I honestly didn't care if every one of these McMuffin-Stuffers got sucked bone dry by these bats. Furthermore, it would've been a more creative endeavor if they'd gotten eaten like kabobs on a spit. It would've saved me from feeling like I needed to spit, anyway.
If you're a big fan of CGI, this might be enough of an appetizer to make you want to see more, but you better be ready to throw The Matrix in your VCR when you get home. If you're a big fan of horror movies, this will be like getting your tastebuds ready for a slab of prime rib, and getting castor oil instead. If you're a big fan of crap, though, this movie is just for you.
Hey, if you're looking for a nice Halloween scare, go rent Blair Witch, or better yet, go find a copy of anything directed by Tod Browning or James Whale. If you're desperate for something to spread on the rosebushes to make them grow, then Bats is just what you need.
Image copyright Destination Films.
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dead on arrival