Stars: Lou Diamond Phillips, Dina Meyer
From the very first scene of the teenage lovers parked in a car in the middle of nowhere, you know that you’ve seen this movie many many times before.
It’s like all those killer bee tales, roving rapacious rodents, “The Birds” and even a little bit of “Aliens”. There is but one original moment in the whole film and that appears in the final 10 seconds. You have all your obligatory characters. There’s the smart young sheriff, the beautiful blonde and quite young wildlife zoologist, her young sidekick assistant (any ethnicity will do – but here’s he’s black. He’s the one who always gets the dumbest lines like ‘What?, I ain’t going in there. You’re crazy. That’s right, you go in there. I’ll stay here and play lookout.’) and the big bad mad scientist who started the whole mess. He’s the older guy in case you have any trouble recognizing him.
Here, it’s designer bats. Two Indonesian Flying Fox bats, the world’s largest (what else?) are genetically altered for super intelligence and aggression. To top it off they’ve been infected by a virus to pass on to other bats and they’ve been turned into omnivores – strictly vegetarian they are not.
They have been unleashed on Gallup, Texas where Sheriff Emmett Kinsey (Lou Diamond Phillips) doesn’t take too kindly to the idea. The CDC brings in Miss Smarty-pants a.k.a. Dr. Sheila Casper (Dina Meyer), her assistant Jimmy (played by Leon) and mess maker Dr. Alexander McCabe (Bob Guntner) who knows a whole lot more than he’s telling at the moment.
Hordes upon hordes of animatronic bats, so ugly you’d think the devil himself was cuter fly rampant looking for victims and then in a most gruesome manner obliterate cattle, small animals and humans. Lots of grisly scenes pepper the film. The rest consists of dumb dialogue and people running around preparing to do battle with the flying foxes and their smaller Texas cousins.
Lotta says: you really have to be a horror freak to want to see this or so bored you’d do yourself in if you don’t get a film fix quick.