If Bats were just a little bit tighter, I would champion it as a bad movie masterpiece. Alas, this has more longueurs than you’d expect in a movie about genetically engineered killer bats, i.e., any. The slack pacing gives you time to get bored and, worse, remember that we all only have so much time to live, so why are you spending 91 minutes on Bats? Bicycle Thieves is only 89 minutes.
But I’m using that as the intro to remindmyself of this, because the truth is, I’ve seen Bats more than once. I’ve even seen Bats more than twice. The last half can drag its feet—and bat thumbs—with each scene running a tad too long, and that makes the movie sink like a stone while I’m watching it … but the movie’s cheesy, wholehearted, and gloriously stupid commitment to its bit is what sticks in my mind. Look, I’m writing this to save myself, because a year or two from now, I’ll be in the mood to watch Bats again, and I need to convince myself not to. It’s only worth watching once.
But if you have any affection for over-the-top creature features, sci-fi horror B-movie nuttiness, and mutant bat puppets, then you do need to watch it once.
Dina Meyer stars as bat expert Sheila, who, along with her assistant Jimmy (Leon), gets called out to a small Texas town with a major bat problem. See, the sinister Dr. McCabe (Bob Gunton, correctly arranging himself in every shot like it’s a comic book panel) has deliberately set some bats to EVIL, and now they’ve escaped and are enlisting local bat populations to their bat cause. The bats are now a combination of a slasher villain (their first targets are some necking teenagers) and a natural disaster, much to the dismay of amiable Sheriff Emmett Kimsey (Lou Diamond Phillips).
At its best and battiest, Bats is an exuberant, ridiculous cartoon. Why has Dr. McCabe made these bats intelligent, bloodthirsty, super-strong omnivores filled with incalculable rage?: “I’m a scientist. That’s what we do.”
Bats, like its mad scientist, goes all in. All the evil bats look like if deranged French bulldogs became bodybuilders. They have—as my wife exclaimed with delight—CHUD eyes. They squirm into cars through tailpipes and air conditioning vents, and one of them gets a cigarette lighter to the face for its trouble. They kill one of their own when it’s forcibly enlisted as a snitch. A bat stalks across a diner counter, practically slavering with glee. People fall chest-deep into lakes of guano. Bats! Bats! It’s hard to have more fun at the movies than watching these ridiculously beefy bats eviscerate a one-stoplight downtown. And while I groan at the movie theater playing Nosferatu, I’m not above laughing at it, too.
The human characters are, alas, not as well-crafted as the bat puppets. They’re more like the background bats in the scene where the bats besiege a local school, by which I mean, “I’m pretty sure these are crepe paper cut-outs you bought at Party City.” Gunton is the only one who goes full pulp—to be fair, he’s the only one who has the dialogue for it—and the rest of the actors have to shuffle along with pasted-on character details like “I’m a small town Texas sheriff who likes opera!” and heartwarming moments like “I’ll give my treasured bat medallion to this CDC guy who was killed by bats, that’s a coherent gesture. He must have loved bats! Especially the ones that murdered him!” And while movies like this don’t really need or benefit from romance subplots, it’s frustrating to suspect that Sheila and Jimmy’s big tender moment would go in that direction … if Jimmy weren’t Black. (At least he gets to live.)
In short, this movie is a mess, and obviously it has nothing to do with real bats (I’m very fond of real bats and will therefore not miss an opportunity to praise Bat World Sanctuary) or real people. But if you want bat puppet carnage and occasional decent set-pieces, this is, again, well-worth watching once, if only so you can quote Gunton’s “I’m a scientist” line as often as I do.
And if you really have the constitution for it, you can drink every time anyone says “bats.” But neither I nor Media Magpies will take legal or moral responsibility for that, as it’s probably not survivable.
Bats is streaming on Amazon Prime and Tubi.
About the writer
Lauren James
Lauren James is a writer who wears many different hats (and pen names). She lives in Connecticut with her wife and two cats.
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Anthologized
A little slice of American folklore that feels like it's been here all along.
Streaming Shuffle
You make your royal bed, and you lie in it.
Anthologized
Alone in vast space and timeless infinity: one man in a ghost town.
Streaming Shuffle
A beautiful slice-of-life film that helped make a career.
Department of
Conversation
What did we watch?
Hacks, Season Three, Episode Four, “Join The Club”
– Unlike Ava, I could easily pitch for shitty franchises. I suspect a lot of them give more creative freedom than you’d expect.
– Ava seems to have seriously let go of trying to control everything. In a way, real life is a series of cycles we find ourselves in, and in good non-tragic drama, it replicates that. Here we have Ava going through a breakup again and taking it a little different.
– Okay, I definitely recognise Helen Hunt. I would say I can’t believe I got outed as a sexist by not recognising a woman who is slightly older, but I easily forget faces with only the slightest change of context.
– This show gets away with Current Year references in a way most other shows don’t (obvious example: Family Guy). It helps that they’re worn lightly and are more about how the characters react to them, just like on The Simpsons.
– “This is exactly why I divorced your ass!” This show is so good at random details.
– I love that Deb genuinely has absorbed Ava’s politics into her worldview. Through sheer force of effort, Ava has put herself in Deb’s head. I love this – I know you guys are in my head the same way.
Fix your tags!
Tristan vs The Edit Function: A Tradegy in 51 Parts (and counting)
“Tradegy” indeed.
*Tragedy
I didn’t know if we could post images here, otherwise I’d post Homer’s vigilante group going “Too late!”
At least I try.
*stares in the general direction of Australia*
Whatever superpowers I have actually allow me to edit comments, so I could fix that for you. I’m still trying to debate whether I want to use my powers to just add, like, 700 likes to one of my comments, though.
I fixed your tags for you. I wanted to read about Hacks and the all-bold was making my eyes hurt.
You’ve finally found a workaround to my refusal to use the edit function.
Just so we’re clear, this is not going to become a Thing.
The Wrong Man – The only 50s Hitchcock I hadn’t seen, and I am not quite sure how a movie filmed in my childhood neighborhood of Jackson Heights stayed off my radar this long. Henry Fonda is a nightclub musician arrested for a string of robberies in a case of mistaken identity, and both he and wife Vera Miles suffer greatly. Based on a true story, but Hitch is not drawn to the legal matters so much as the Kafkaesque nightmare Fonda faces and to being caught in not just the system but the hands of fate, or of God. This is a very strange Hitchcock film leaving behind the glorious color of the time and limiting the flourishes, emphasizing a certain degree of realism (like filming on location as much as possible). This seems a low energy movie at first, but it builds a certain degree of momentum as Fonda faces his fate and only barely escapes conviction, Fonda is very good, as is Miles. Fun facts: the defense attorney played by Anthony Quayle would parlay his fame from the case into a successful political career; I used to catch the bus at the Victor Moore Arcade for years, but it was torn down and replaced with a modern transit hub.
Frasier, “I Hate Frasier Crane” – This four word sentence appears in a newspaper column, leading Frasier to lose his cool, yell at the columnist on the air, and ultimately get challenged to a public fight. We get the full Frasier here, the pompous, arrogant, thin-skinned, and verbose knucklehead who would careen about on Cheers. But we also get Frasier examining his manhood in between the extremes of father and brother. The course correction to make Frasier a sustainable lead on a show has begun. Joe Mantegna is the voice of the offending columnist. (I could spend a lot of time noting all the famous actors who call in to Frasier’s show. I will be selective and just pick significant ones.)
“Did you write ‘I Hate Frasier Crane?'”
*innocently* “What’s a ‘Frasier?'”
“And what if your family don’t like bread, they like… making fun of pompous radio psychiatrists?”
Wrong Man is bleak, depressing and hopeless. As you mention there is a degree of realism that is unlike other Hitchcock films (at least till Psycho) and the b&w adds to the somberness. It’s kind of a lot to sit through. Doesn’t Vera Miles crack under all the pressure turning into a zombie in a mental institution, iirc?
She utterly cracks (and Miles plays it about as well as you could given the story and the director). Accurate to life, sadly, as the poor woman did not in fact recover as well as the closing title card states.
Gattaca — this looks fantastic, the retro future production design makes superb use out of its settings and well-placed cars, and it’s a very smart way of using a few resources well to let the audience draw in any blanks (no need for a big fake future city, there is an Alley and a Club and a Tunnel). And this is complemented by the cast, absolutely pitch perfect to have the high-class superior played by Gore Vidal and the low-class supervisor played by Ernest Borgnine. But this stays at “pretty good” instead of great — the sci-fi conceit is a great one and the con within it rules, suspense at maintaining a false identity is always fun, but the murder mystery that prompts it is a squib. Not in the sense of whodunnit, although Ebert’s Law of Extraneous Characters comes in handy here, but that Hawke clearly did and could not do it, and this winds up undermining the philosophical argument here. Andrew Niccol wants us to believe that this genetically structured world is a dystopia and that Hawke’s striving humanity is noble; what would make him more human is believing him capable of murder. Niccol also wrote The Truman Show and Hawke’s ending here is similar to Carrey’s there, but Carrey has more to lose and more to grow — Gattaca’s melancholy has the tone of an after-school special. Far better is the near-throwaway bit of Borgnine confusedly wondering why the cops are so intent on policing the world through collecting garbage, a society defined by excrement has a lot more sting to it.
“Pretty good” would turn out to be Niccol’s ceiling, and not one he reached that often. One of the rare people I think would have made a better career as a lazy executive – come up with a killer premise, hand it over to other people, hit the golf course.
The Truman Show is in the same Criterion collection as this and I want to revisit it, I recall it being much stronger and of course my man Peter Weir is in charge of that one. But I think Niccol is more than just an ideas man, the premise of this is one thing but the aesthetic execution is what makes it really shine and I’m giving Niccol credit for that as well. I think he needed a strong hand in story (Weir) to reach his full potential, much like how Hawke needs horrific leg surgery to reach his.
Truman Show came out at just the right time for me to be an obsessed little nerd around it and I read the published screenplay and to give credit where due I remember it being about 80-90% accurate to the film. But the bits that are dropped I think shows Weir really keying into what was important to the underlying ideas, and in execution the movie has a focused pace that Niccol never approaches as a director. I agree Gattaca is the best of his I’ve seen (pretty good!), but then he’s got Sim0ne and In Time which I can report are both terrible executions of high concepts and Good Kill and Anon which are reportedly terrible executions of high concepts. Lord of War is the only other thing of his I’m at all tempted by.
“really keying into what was important to the underlying ideas” is exactly what I was trying to get at with Conor below — this stuff is there but not drawn out like it should be. And it has been a looooong time but I recall Lord of War being good? Cage does good work and Eamonn Walker is excellent as Legally Not Charles Taylor.
Can confirm Lord Of War being pretty good.
Jude Law’s ending also strikes me as a bit sour and ableist, right? It’s been a minute but that SPOILER the paraplegic wants to burn to death rather than, I dunno, read books and redirect his life is a bit much.
It works best as part of the argument against all the genetic fiddling in the first place — Hawke is imperfect and is kept from reaching his potential by SOCIETY; Law is perfect according to SOCIETY but finds that is actually meaningless (and the fact that his perfection is not altered by his disability makes that SOCIETAL perfection an even odder construct). Even the winners are unhappy in this SOCIETY! But yeah, as a thesis it works but as a character it is undercooked. Same with the fraternal stuff in the movie, instead of making that a twist it should’ve been foregrounded and explored. This is why it feels after-school specially to me, the message overwhelms what should be the meat of the movie.
Nosferatu – Article synergy! Sort of, not really a bat-strong interpretation of the material.
I came into this pretty excited because Eggar’s has long been one of the more interesting filmmakers but he has yet to produce a film that had me totally over the moon. This one has a banger of a horror introduction, absolutely perfect from a style-meets-scares standpoint. The movie hits these highs intermittently throughout, but I found most everything in between flat. Maybe Eggars was cleverly structuring it like a heart monitor reading.
Everybody is 100% committed in their role – something I’ve always appreciated about performances under Eggars – whether it’s monstrosity, bafflement, fright, or insanity. Unfortunately everybody plays their note and only their note. Depp is consistently good but only becomes great when she finally is asked to play something other than eloquent panic in a soprano register. That said, her quaking physicality will stick with me for a long while, Murnau is the cue here, but I could see her doing a fun turn as Frankenstein’s Bride. I dunno, maybe I was too tired going in, but I wouldn’t put this up with my favorite Eggars, though as always he delivers with indelible details. What’s the only way to make Orlock, a creature constantly merged with and perhaps made of shadow, even more creepy? Give him a mustache of course.
Baby Girl – So we’re agreed. Every 25 years we get a new Nicole Kidman sexy Christmas movie. Looking forward to 2049, if the pattern holds, she’ll still look great.
Also she is still a very compelling actor, this is very helpful in a movie, and it will make you miss the movie stars who could (and had the opportunity to) do this. This movie isn’t going to make a run at Eyes Wide Shut for the crown of this extra-microgenre, but it’s an interesting companion piece. Here Kidman plays something like her Alice character who has the adventure instead of Bill (this would have been interesting in an impossible world where Cruise plays the husband, but we’ve traded up for Antonio Bandaras, no complaints). It’s a right muddle plotwise, and the characters are more interesting than the story they’re in. Not quite everything you could want for Christmas, maybe you were a little too naughty this year.
Programming note, the AMC theater skipped the Kidman-hosted promo before the film, maybe for better immersion? It would have been an interesting effect to have Kidman stare straight into the audience’s eyes and declare “They are!” immediately before the opening sex scene.
Isn’t the only reference to bats in the entire Dracula novel the American reminiscing about that time he saw a vampire bat? Where the Dracula=bat motif came from, I couldn’t tell you.
(opens newspaper)
Oh, I’d say we as a species were VERY naughty last year…
Fascinated by your competing (incorrect) spellings of Eggers’ last name here.
I have now joined Tristan’s crusade against the edit button. Just this one time.
On Dangerous Ground – Not a GREAT noir, with two plot halves really united into one, but deeply affecting and poetic as with all Ray movies, though this one has sequences shadow directed by co-star Ida Lupino when Ray apparently got sick. I might look into which scenes she did, but the confrontation with Danny feels like her work in The Hitch-hiker, impactful filmmaking with minimal cuts and imagery to emphasize the character’s POV and heighten suspense. The treatment of the blind and mentally ill is mixed as with much of Hollywood in 1951. Mary doesn’t want anyone’s pity as a blind woman, but still does a big flower wilt near the end about a potential operation. Ryan brings enough grit, and both filmmakers know how to create strong imagery, enough to redeem the weaknesses. Expiring on Criterion.
The Crimson Kimono – Also expiring on Criterion and this is just terrific. Sam Fuller continues to feel decades ahead of the time, especially in casting the charming and affecting James Shigeta as the co-romantic lead (also a fine singer, though not in this movie) and delving into microaggressions and cultural alienation. There’s a very modern sensibility in how Joe has to walk a delicate line as a Nisei in a largely white society and has built his own community with other Japanese-Americans in Little Tokyo, as well as how Chris, as a white woman, loves Joe but can only understand Joe’s concerns about Charlie up to a certain point. What’s less modern might be the ending but it satisfies emotionally in a bittersweet sense, as with all of Fuller’s movies so far.
I finished both What We Do In The Shadows and Los Espookys and am happy with the finale of the former, the latter feels like it had at least two more seasons of weird, playful energy going with Tati’s mystery purse and the various illusions of the group. However, I demand less Fred Armisen in my shows and movies, he’s extremely prolific AND unfunny, and every time he appears, I think, “What is this grinning, annoyingly sincere actor doing in this scene, and do they think he’s funny?” (At least one actress who dated him also implied he’s a psychopath.)
Cannot imagine the frustration of watching two movies where people get murdered and then a a show where Fred Armisen does not get murdered. Murder should be on the table! Extremely prolific and extremely unfunny is indeed the problem, the other part is how he is always Armisening and hogging the screen — compare to an actual brilliant comedic actor like John Candy, who is often playing within a specific range and to a certain pitch, but is never ostentatious and is always incredibly generous with his partners.
Candy is a good comparison here, there was an actor who famously didn’t like himself and used that to share the screen, not dominate it. The flipside is Nicolas Cage, who as Tatiana Maslany pointed out is good at giving the scene over to other actors while being a famously idiosyncratic and dominating performer.
Nic Cage is interesting in that he’s loud and weird a lot of the time, but he’s also giving the other actor a lot to work with and respond to. Actors tend to kick it up when they’re around him.
It’s great how we all agree Fred Armisen should be killed.
One of the only things I remember him working in was Toast of Tinseltown, and there he was playing a weird asshole prone to flipping out and who was quite obviously hiding some big secret. So, you know, they really wrote to him.
Blackmail – hey it’s Hitchcock day in the comments! I was expecting this to be my second silent-era Hitch but I guess I missed the fairly important memo about it being the first major British venture into sound (although a silent version does also exist). There are definitely some teething-troubles as a result – not least because they decided to have another actress deliver the lead’s dialogue, live on set but off screen (!), to get around her Czech accent. As such I suspect the silent version is probably a little better, but there’s still some Hitchcock goodness to enjoy and obviously it’s fun to see him wrestle with new advances even if the result is sometimes a little awkward.
Simpsons, “Like Father Like Clown” – haven’t seen this episode for a long time, it’s a really good one! Love to see Lisa and Bart teaming up in search of a common goal that uses their individual strengths so well. And, of course, it’s very funny.
The Simpsons in Hardy Boys/Stand By Me mode is some of the best Simpsons.
Good write-up — they can’t all be Tremors but man, do the non-Gunton actors here stink (although as you note, a lot of that is down to the writing). Is it harder to make a B movie than it looks? I believe this was a FOTI back in the day and it’s how I watched it, and while the puppets absolutely rule the second half of the movie bogs way the fuck down. I think what annoys me most about the flick is that it has the vibe of a made-for-SciFi cheapie while also clearly being a theatrical release — Mansquito (the bat’s worst nightmare?) has an excuse, this does not. A little more work would’ve gone a long way here.
Yeah, the fact that this had an actual budget really does hurt it: I’m glad they spent so much on puppets, but they could have chopped out almost all of the pointless helicopter shots and used them to pay for a script doctor or a few more rehearsals. (And thanks!)
Petition for “nun-Guntons” to be used sitewide as a term for cast members who aren’t up to the task.
“Only a non-Gunton would refuse to sign this petition!”
*takes the hood off Netflix Daredevil* ah I knew, this thing’s crawling with non-Guntons.
Bats! I remember this being a theatrical release back in the day, I can still picture the ads in the paper. Bats!
I can only hope some ad called it the battiest movie ever.
I think it was modeled on the poster where the title is upside down (like a bat!), probably why I remember it:
https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BOTdhZDJkNDgtODVkMS00ZDcxLWE3N2ItMDNkNzNiYmQyNmJhXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyNzc5MjA3OA@@._V1_FMjpg_UX1000_.jpg
I remember this poster! One local video rental store had it up for years. No idea if they had the actual movie for rent at any time though. It certainly made the movie look good/cool.
Bats!
Same, this poster was one of those that scared me off the movie as a kid (same with the Sleepaway Camp VHS cover and back.)
Now I’m wishing it had this ad campaign.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UpPx7E27Bc8
Year of the Month update:
Coming in February, you can sign up to write about anything from 2016 along with these fine folks:
TBD: Bridgett Taylor: Rogue One
Tentative: Sam Scott: The Neon Demon
Feb 7th: Gillian Nelson: Queen of Katwe
Feb. 14th: Gillian Nelson: Milo Murphy’s Law
Feb. 21st: Gillian Nelson: Pete’s Dragon
And there’s still time to join this team for 1947:
TBD: John Anderson: T-Men
Tentative: John Anderson: Nightmare Alley
Jan 16th: Cori Domschot: The Farmer’s Daughter
Jan. 17th: Gillian Nelson: Sleepytime Donald
Jan. 23rd: Cori Domschot: Down to Earth
Jan. 27th: Cliffy73: Miracle on 34th Street
Jan. 31st: Pluto’s Blue Note
“If Bats were just a little bit tighter, I would champion it as a bad movie masterpiece. Alas, this has more longueurs than you’d expect in a movie about genetically engineered killer bats, i.e., any.”
How many B-movies would be masterpieces if there was a market for sub-hour films? Remember that runner in Mystery Science Theater where they’d go into despair every time someone climbed a rock in a Corman flick?
Did anyone else read the title and just have Calvin’s shitty paper about bats stuck in their head?