Bats Parent Guide

Watching a good movie is like smooth sailing, while others are more like wading…

When bat specialist Dr. Sheila Casper (Dina Meyer) and her assistant, Jimmy (Leon) are called to Gallup Texas to investigate reports of man-eating bats, they are skeptical of Sheriff Emmett Kimsey’s (Lou Diamond Phillips) claims. Casper insists that bats would never kill humans, until Dr. Alexander McCabe (Bob Gunton) corrects her. It seems McCabe, a biological scientist, has given these bats a bad attitude in the form of a virus. Since their escape they’ve been looking for some real fast food - the type that runs and screams incessantly in horror movies.

Truly these talented creatures are not your typical bats. They know how to work a close-up and deliver the best performances in this movie. With their eyes aglow, they cock their heads, give a threatening growl, and take a little screen time to make their victim sweat. However, if you’re one of the poor saps swarmed in a wide shot, you’re devoured faster than a fly on a frog farm.

While the scientists work by day to figure out how to contain the bats by night, Sheriff Kimsey decides he 0x2018ain’t gonna have his town taken over by bats’. Pulling out his gun, he and the town folk take to the streets shooting, but there are more bats than bullets. With images swishing this way and that (seems the poor guy running the movie camera got attacked, too), we don’t see a whole lot of detail until it’s all over and the streets are filled with half eaten bodies.

All the mayhem, blood, and profanities are only part of the reason you may want to spare your family from seeing Bats. The script is so bad, you wonder if the creators originally set out to make a spoof film they hoped would become a 0x2018cult classic’.

For myself, the one scene I could relate to was when Casper and Kimsey wade through an abandoned mine, up to their armpits in guano (bat droppings), looking for those bats. Yup, I know how that feels.

About author

Rod Gustafson

Rod Gustafson has worked in various media industries since 1977. He founded Parent Previews in 1993, and today continues to write and broadcast the reviews in newspapers, on radio and (of course) on the Internet. His efforts also include writing and researching media in all its forms and observing how it effects society and culture. He and his wife Donna have four children.