Bats (1999)

Bats Entertainment!

Bats (1999)
Directed by Louis Murneau
Written by John Logan

Gallup, Texas: A hunky teen parks with a girl in lovers’ lane and proceeds to strike out, despite his wearing a fetching shirt from the Roy Rogers collection. Suddenly, we hear squealing, and an ominous flapping sound. “Something touched my hand,” he remarks, uneasily. Then he gets out of the car so it can touch other parts of his body, since random contact with night-flying pests seems like the only action he’s going to get tonight.

When even that doesn’t work, he rejoins the girl, who has agreed to neck with him in exchange for a lukewarm Coors. Suddenly, and all at once, the ardent couple is struck by a freight train, hit by a swarm of bats, and rammed by the camera dolly.

A representative from the Centers for Disease Control whisks Dr. Dina Meyer away to Texas, where she’s met by Sheriff Lou Diamond Phillips. Sheriff Lou drawls “Uh-huh” in response to everything Dr. Dina says, but with a heavy ironic stress on the last syllable, so the audience will know that while he’s Walking Tall, he’s doing it in a post-modern kind of way.

He shows Dina a mannequin saturated with Beef-A-Roni, and she digs a bat fang out of its jugular vein. Nevertheless, she insists that “bats do not kill people!” and suggests that the fang was planted by Detective Mark Furhman. But at the autopsy, they are joined by Dr. Bob Gunton, who instantly strikes the audience as creepy, due to his shifty-eyed, evasive manner, and his history of appearing in Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals. Dr. Bob has been performing “virus-based” experiments on two Indonesian Flying Foxes, which subsequently escaped, and now it seems that bats do kill people, requiring the National Bat Association to coin a new slogan.

Later, they find another mutilated corpse. The crusty female mayor of the town arrives—judging by her apparel, she was interrupted in mid-square dance—and demands to know what’s going on. “Well,” says Sheriff Lou, “We think this was done by some sort of...bats.” But he can’t quite keep a straight face, and you get that feeling that for Lou, he might as well have been saying, “We think the victim was mauled by Smurfs.” Regardless, the Sheriff goes on to insist that they have to alert the public and close the square dances! But the mayor is reluctant, knowing the local merchants rely on the vital square dancing economy for the majority of their sales of ugly shirts and huge belt buckles.

Dr. Dina quizzes Dr. Bob about just what he did to the bats, deducing that his virus increased their intelligence and capacity to work together communally, giving bats, for the first time in their evolutionary history, the ability to compete on Family Feud.

And why did he do this? “Because,” he says, “I’m a scientist. That’s what we do. We make everything a little better.” Well, he does have a point. From drought-resistant strains of corn, to bats that can kill Texans, the history of science is the story of small, but necessary improvements in our quality of life.

Unfortunately, the virus begins to infect the local bats, making them all dangerously smart. Even worse, the virus is limited to bats, and so can’t be spread to Texans. Our heroes must now annihilate the colony before it migrates, spreading the contagion and eliminating square dancing all over the hemisphere.

Dr. Dina and Sheriff Lou wander around outside at night so they can be attacked by computer-generated effects. They make it to his truck, but the super-intelligent bats keep smacking into the windows and sticking there, like so many suction-cupped Garfield dolls. Realizing they look ridiculous, the bats take off, but leave behind an ugly hand puppet.

Dr. Dina cleverly radio-tags the puppet and releases it so they can follow it back to the roost. But Dr. Bob’s original two Superbats realize he’s wearing a wire, and they kill him before he can squeal.

The CDC contacts the inhabitants of Gallup, and orders an immediate evacuation. Unfortunately, the townsfolk think this means they’re supposed to eat plenty of roughage and prunes, and they just keep hanging around. Suddenly, Junior Samples gets into a wrestling match with a giant bat over a Ham and Swiss Bowl at Dennys, while other bats swarm and attack the Village People.

As the flock begins to kill and feast on everyone in sight, Dr. Dina drives the surviving people into the safety of the local movie house. Unfortunately, it’s showing Patch Adams, and they all come rushing back out into the street.

Dina grabs a gun and corners one of the giant Superbats in a convenience store. She takes frantic shots at the creature while it leisurely shops for Moon Pies and motor oil, but only manages to blow out the windows and destroy a point-of-purchase display for Saltine crackers.

Suddenly, the entire flock of killer bats turn as one and flap away into the night, because they realize that it’s 8:50 PM. The West Wing will be on in ten minutes, and as super-intelligent mammals, they’re naturally swayed by its impressive showing at the Golden Globes.

Daylight arrives, and as the Texas National Guard haul away the corpses, Sheriff Lou pulls out a bottle and takes a swig. “Old Texas custom,” he explains. Whenever a town full of rednecks gets slaughtered by mutated bats, local law enforcement is supposed to celebrate with a snort of Old Granddad.

They barricade themselves in the schoolhouse and cover the windows with chain-link, while Sheriff Lou puts on Montserrat’s recording of Donizetti’s “Lucia,” on the theory that opera will repel bats the same way it keeps teenagers from hanging around the parking lot of the 7-11.

Realizing that Dr. Bob isn’t cutting it as a villain, the filmmakers suddenly lob in an Evil Government Guy, who explains to no one in particular that Dr. Bob works in the weapons division, and the Pentagon has been developing killer bats for over a decade. “Yes,” he declares. “It was us!”

But Dr. Bob isn’t about to be out-evilled that easily, and pulls a gun. He calls his creations to his side, and the director makes another stab at horrifying us, but with the bat puppets taped over the windows, it just looks like a school-sponsored haunted house. (Which, we should note, did raise considerably more money for the marching band than last year’s Murderous Bat-themed car wash.)

Dr. Bob goes outside so he and the bats can rip off the end of Willard and he can go back to playing Juan Peron in the Long Beach Civic Light Opera production of Evita!

Dr. Dina decides to enter the mine where the bats are roosting, and turn on a big air conditioner that will freeze them all to death. Unfortunately, an air strike has been ordered, and they only have an hour before the bombs start to fall. On the bright side, the mission has been entrusted to the Texas Air National Guard, so they’ll probably wind up bombing the Mall of America by mistake.

Dr. Dina and Sheriff Lou put on space suits and descend into the mine. They switch on the cooler, but one of the Superbats knocks Lou down, rubs his face in guano, and makes him say “Chiroptera.”

Eventually, he and Dina wind up running frantically from an onrushing swarm of computer generated bats, and their own stink. They reach the surface and blow up the entrance to the mine, just as the fighter craft release their pay-loads, and score a direct hit on the Arrowhead Motor Lodge in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. The End.

If you checked out last week’s review, you will have noticed that like other fields of mad science, Bat Mutation has followed the familiar arc, from Bob Vila-like mad doctors who crank out their Do-It-Yourself abominations in basement workshops, to multi-billion dollar bio warfare programs using the latest in genetically engineered viral pathogens and actors who can panic in front of a blue screen.

But more importantly, these films demonstrate that Bat Mutation is a fine art, like winemaking or glassblowing, steeped in tradition and passed down from generation to generation. Oh sure, Dr. Bob employed state-of-the-art gene-splicing techniques to create a more intelligent and aggressive breed, whereas Bela relied upon dry cleaning technology to produce an abnormally large bat with a fierce distaste for imposter fragrances, but their goals were the same. In fact, throughout the entire history of cinematic mad science, from Edison’s Frankenstein in 1910, to Bats, Hollow Man and beyond, nearly every mad doctor has pursued the same unchanging ambition: to create, with his own hands, a startling, undreamt-of thing that will cause a tremendous amount of inconvenience and property damage before eventually coming back and killing him.

Today, critics bemoan the dearth of students pursuing higher degrees in math or science, but we believe they err in blaming the nation’s schools. Instead, we say blame Hollywood. After all, would you rather take a marketing job with room for advancement, or spend many years and hundreds of thousands of dollars on post- graduate studies that will inevitably culminate with your getting squished by a giant tarantula?

Anyway. Just something to think about while you browse those brochures at the Junior College Job Fair.