WEEK 3: CREEPY CRAWLY CRITTERS
Bats (1999) Review and Bats:
Human Harvest (2007) Review
To all Canadian readers, Happy Thanksgiving! My gift to
you is a double helping of killer creature reviews!
There’s a story behind this double-feature review. When I
was first discovering animal attack films as a kid, I rented one from the video
store called Bats, and while I found
it entertaining, everyone else in my family hated it. I wanted to re-watch it
and review it for this year’s Creepy Cinema, but I was dismayed when a copy of Bats proved difficult to locate. On the
other hand, I did find a copy of the sort-of-sequel, Bats: Human Harvest. Then, just as I was nearing completion of this
year’s Creepy Cinema, I happened to find a copy of the original Bats at a video store that was closing out.
So, with both films at hand, I bring you a review of each, just for a special
Thanksgiving treat! 
Bats begins like a
typical slasher film: two teenagers in a car in a deserted locale at night,
drinking beer. Bam! They’re attacked by a swarm of bats and brutally killed!
The movie wastes no time establishing the main cast and having them figure out
what the problem is, as opposed to taking half the movie just to realize what’s
been causing the murder spree. A swarm of genetically-altered
bats have undergone all the worst possible alterations: they’re smarter,
they work better in teams, they are omnivorous, and they are just plain mean.
The swarm descends on the town at night and roosts in a nearby abandoned mine
during the day. The local sheriff, along with a zoologist and her assistant who
both specialize in bats, and the idiot scientist who made them, must
figure out a way to stop the bad bats before the military bombs the entire town.
For a fairly conventional killer animal flick, the main cast
of characters is sort of an odd mix. There’s the tough-as-nails sheriff, A.K.A
the hero, the bat expert, A.K.A the hot girl, the assistant/sidekick, A.K.A the
token rapper who’s always making quips and getting scared of everything, and
the scientist A.K.A the Dr. Frankenstein archetype. The scientist is the one
that doesn’t seem to fit in to the group. Include the fact none of the others seem
to like him (for obvious reasons), and it makes the dynamics in the group a
little off. The only stars that stand out are Lou Diamond Phillips as the sheriff (he’s no
stranger to low-budget sci-fi flicks), and Bob Gunton as the
scientist, who played the warden in The
Shawshank Redemption. How do you go from a beloved cinema classic like Shawshank Redemption
to Bats? He seems disinterested for most of the movie,
and the acting all-around is average.
The bats, on the other hand, are the real stars of this
movie. They are done with a mix of cgi and puppetry, and the puppetry, done
partly by effects wizard Greg Nicotero, is great. But what about the cgi?
There’s a difference between cgi that looks bad, and cgi that looks dated. The
majority of the cgi in Bats looks
dated, but there are, admittedly, some moments that look truly terrible. The
main thing this movie has going for it is the abundant action. On a budget somewhere
in the neighbourhood of only 6 million bucks, they packed in as much action as
they could get, and while some moments stand out because they’re hilariously
misguided (one scene in particular has a bunch of the bats trying to penetrate some
chain link fencing, and none of the bats are moving, making it blatantly
obvious they are all a bunch of plastic bats), all of the action scenes are fun
and fast-paced. There are some weird camera angles and close-up action that’s
so shaky you can’t make heads or tails of things, but for the most part, it’s
all easy to follow and works. I think there’s actually more bat action in this
movie than in The Dark Knight Rises,
and that movie was almost twice as long, and it had Batman for crying out loud!
Bats is
consistently entertaining. Is it a good movie? Not really, but it does have one
of the best killer animal movie endings of all-time. After the final showdown,
a bat crawls out from under the ground, screeching, looking all menacing, and
the music swells to make it this dramatic moment, and then out of nowhere, a
truck drives over the bat, squishing it, and the movie ends as the truck keeps
driving on, the occupants unaware they just saved viewers from a sequel. Oh,
but if only we had been saved from a sequel...
So that’s Bats for
you—not a good quality movie, but fun just the same, and if you saw it at a
young age, it probably holds some nostalgic value. What holds no nostalgia, or
any value at all, is Bats: Human Harvest,
which is a made-for-TV movie produced by the Sci-Fi Channel, and as far as I
could tell, holds no connection to the first movie. I was hesitant to watch
this sequel just based on the cover art alone. The “A” in BATS is an actual bat, but it doesn’t look anything like the letter
“A”, so the title looks like B TS: HUMAN
HARVEST. But then again, the title of the first Bats is spelt upside down, so it looks like a backwards Stab, which isn’t a great deal better.
I knew this wasn’t going to be a good movie—it definitely
couldn’t be better than the first—but damn, this sequel really sucks ass, not blood. The
series of events (notice I don’t use the word plot, because it barely
constitutes a plot) chronicles a military team going to Belzar Forest in Russia
to rescue a doctor, and it turns out bats are there attacking people. Such a
simple premise, which turned into such a simple disaster.
Bats: Human Harvest
is almost so-bad-it’s-funny in a few scenes, but as a whole, it’s just a piece
of trash, and not the type of trash that’s so horrendous it warrants pondering
over or seeing just to witness such an anomaly. It starts out with two guys in
an army truck who have some of the worst Russian accents I’ve ever heard
(their mouths don’t even match the words), and they come across a kid’s bicycle
in the middle of nowhere, so they investigate, and bats attack them and they
die. Then the rest of the movie is just scene after agonizing scene of army
folk running around being chased by bad cgi bats and spouting horrendous dialogue
that’s so dull and pointless it might as well be in another language. The teacher
in Charlie Brown is more interesting
to listen to.
The guy who I assume is what real movies refer to as a “main
character” looks like a discount Michael
Biehn, but that’s sort of an insult to
Michael Biehn, because unlike Michael Biehn, this guy doesn’t know how to act,
and his character doesn’t even have common sense. He has to be reminded to use
his gun instead of his knife. More than once. That’s the kind of intelligence
this movie features. This is the sort of movie where if you shoot at an outhouse
with a slingshot, the whole outhouse collapses (no joke, that actually happens
in the movie). It’s not just a bad movie; it’s obnoxiously bad, like King of the Lost World bad. I almost
forgot to mention, the tagline says “Don’t go near the dark.” These bats
primarily attack in the daylight. Logic = 0.0%. 
Should I even comment further on the special effects? In the first Bats, cgi was used for the swarms of
bats, but it looked passable. In Bats:
Human Harvest, the bats are all cgi, and believe it or not, they don’t look
that terrible, but when you think
about it, a little brown bat is a pretty simple thing to animate. It doesn’t
require any texture, and if it moves fast enough across the screen, it just
looks like a brown blur anyway. But these bats are always cgi, even in close-up.
And, this movie was made 8 years after the first one. I couldn’t find an
estimated budget anywhere online, and I know it was made-for-TV, but come on!
They had 8 whole years to improve cgi effects since then! While the bats could
have looked worse, other things, like the cgi helicopters, look about as bad as
possible. In fact, even stuff like the military outfits and weapons look fake
and cheap. Not a single thing in this movie looks or feels authentic. I’d be
surprised if they even filmed in a real forest.
Bats: Human Harvest
is not the worst killer animal movie ever, and it’s not so aggressively bad
that it’s worth getting all upset about. It’s just a lame, cheap, bland piece
of filmmaking that isn’t worth talking about any further, and ultimately,
blends in with all the other atrocious releases SyFy has put out over the
years. At the half hour mark, I gave up, and as I wrote this review, the movie
played in the background. I looked up every once in awhile to see if anything
interesting or noteworthy was happening. It was just more of the same crap. It lacks anything
worth seeing, and all I can say is, seek out the first Bats movie if you want some shameless fun. Just make sure it’s the
first movie, not the second.
Hope you enjoyed this special double review. I’ll be back to
single reviews tomorrow until the end of the month, with lots more creature
carnage to come!
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