SpuffyWeb Sadly Over-hyped

Dotsthavesp I wanted to but couldn't!

Freaktana A Major Disappointment

Donald Seymour This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

BA_Harrison Bats is a very generic late-'90s killer animal flick that follows most of the genre rules to the letter. All of the expected characters are present and correct—untrustworthy government scientist, brave local sheriff, doomed-to-die deputy, dedicated (and sexy) animal expert, wise-cracking sidekick—and the plot develops in an extremely predictable manner, opening with young couple alone in the dark falling victim to the bats, before introducing a whole townful of potential victims, and climaxing with our brave heroes risking their lives in a showdown against the deadly critters.It all gets very silly at times, with perhaps the most unbelievable scene being the securing and electrification of a whole school by just four people in the space of a few hours, but it still proves to be quite a bit of fun, director Louis Morneau keeping the action moving at such a swift pace that such nonsense is fairly easy to forgive (unlike the director's tendency to 'skew', stretch and blur the image during the frenzied bat attacks, which I found bloody irritating).What really helps to elevate this formulaic nonsense to slightly-above-average are the solid cast and some fairly decent special effects. Dina Meyer (of Starship Troopers fame) and Lou Diamond Phillips make for a likable protagonists, and Leon is far less objectionable as 'token comedy relief black guy' than one might expect. As for the bats, they're a mixture of more than reasonable CGI and nifty puppetry from KNB; my only gripe, FX-wise, is a lack of splatter—a bit more gore would have been very welcome.

trashgang Almost ten years old and I never took the time to watch this movie, why, because everybody said that it was bad. But there comes a time when you can find those movies in the sell out section of your local DVD shop. So it happened, although it was the extra beyond limits low budget section. I picked it up and plugged it in. Starts of pretty well I thought with the killing of a young couple. But then the movie declines in a real bad movie. The lead actors are surely doing this to cash in, Lou Diamond Philips was once on top of the list with movies like La Bamba and Young Guns. Here he delivers bad acting. For Dina Meyer we could tell the same. They are both never believable. And the real actors are the bats themselves. We have seen this kind of story a thousand times. Especially in the fifties there were those creature features. Now and then they make a new creature movie like Host and that kind of movies really have a storyline. There is never any suspense in this flick. No blood, no nudity no gore. When the bats attack you will never be frightened, the bats themselves look like Disneybats so you could guess how bat, euh, bad they are. When the town is attacked it made me think of The Birds and the link with the posters "Nosferatu" at the cinema are ridiculous too. They bring in the army, and they couldn't destroy the bats, come on. As this is a real Hollywood product with wellknown actors I just gave it a 2 out of ten. The editing is boring, score is terrible, anyway, it just got a two because at the end of the movie you really got frightened, a bat arises from the earth, frightened that they would make Bats 2, but it is destroyed in a funny way. Avoid it at all costs.

disdressed12 this is a strange little movie.i mean it's very low budget and mostly poorly acted,perhaps on purpose.i'd swear it was done tongue in cheek yet at the same time it seems to take itself seriously.it has some pretty cringe worthy dialogue to say the least,and the story is quite silly,in my mind.at the same time though,it is fairly fun,and some of the characters are interesting.it's no masterpiece.in fact far from it.but i did find it a passably entertaining diversion.if you keep you expectation level really low for this movie,you might get some enjoyment out of it.it wasted around 85 minutes or so(not counting the end credits.it's not memorable,and once it's over,you'll forget all about it.for me,Bats is a 4.5/10

bkoganbing Bats, a film that should have premiered on the Science Fiction channel on cable, somehow got a theatrical release. If it had been made fifty years earlier I can definitely see Boris Karloff or Bela Lugosi in the part that Bob Gunton plays as the mad scientist.The scariest thing about Bats is not the creatures themselves although they are the ugliest looking things this side of the Black Scorpion. The scariest part of the film was Bob Gunton's portrayal of the mad scientist who created this race of killer omnivirous Bats. He's identified as working for the Center For Disease Control. I was watching this figuring out how this creep got government clearance.Yet Gunton is the most enjoyable thing in this film. And you got to love the fact that he had all these government facilities to work with, he's not hidden away in some laboratory in an old castle the way Karloff and Lugosi used to be. He's bred this race of flying fox bats from Indonesia which are aggressive to begin with and they've taken up residence in a bat cavern in Lou Diamond Phillips's county where he's the sheriff. After several suspicious deaths with mutilation, the cause is identified and zoologists Dina Meyer and Leon Robinson are brought in to clean out the bat cave. If you care about how and if they do it by all means watch the film and the hint is, think blob.Bats will never go down as a great science fiction classic, but it does have a certain campiness to it. And Gunton is a hoot.