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| View Larger Image | Bats | DVDStarring: Lou Diamond Phillips, Dina Meyer, Bob Gunton, Leon, Carlos Jacott
Directed By: Louis Morneau
| List Price: | $9.95 | | | Available: | Usually ships in 24 hours |
| | Binding: | DVD | | Rating: |  | | Run Time: | 91 minutes | | Format: | Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DVD, Letterboxed, Special Edition, Widescreen, NTSC | | Studio: | Sony Pictures | | Number of Discs: | 1 | | Aspect Ratio: | 2.35:1 | | Release Date: | February 22, 2000 | | Sales Rank: | 49,072th |
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EDITORIAL REVIEWS |
Product Description
Genetically altered super-bats have been unleashed by a deranged scientist and its up to a small town sheriff and a team of bat specialists to stop this blood-thirsty menace from spreading. Special features: never-seen-before footage uncut r rated version batty bloopers photo galleries and much more. Studio: Sony Pictures Home Ent Release Date: 03/23/2004 Starring: Lous Diamond Phillips Dina Meyer Run time: 91 minutes Rating: R Director: Louis Morneau |
Amazon.com
This movie is for everyone who misses the old Roger Corman monster movies, only it has animatronics and computer effects instead of papiermâché. The title of Bats pretty much sums up the plot: Crazed bats are running amok, disemboweling people and cattle. Only beautiful wildlife zoologist Dina Meyer (Johnny Mnemonic, Starship Troopers) and stalwart sheriff Lou Diamond Phillips (La Bamba, the Young Guns movies, Courage Under Fire) can save the day! Let's be frank: The scenario is ludicrous, the dialogue God-awful, the special effects unconvincing--try as they might, the bats just aren't that scary--but what does it matter? The movie rips along effectively. There's always a bat attack just around the corner and the director makes liberal use of all kinds of editing and camera effects, including a distorted bat-cam point of view that makes no sense at all but is pretty entertaining. Various scenes imitate Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, but lack even a hint of that movie's eerie precision. The actors play it straight without trying to be particularly serious. All in all, Bats knows what it is--trash-horror--and accomplishes its ends with good humor. Not quite up to the standard of Tremors (still the definitive trash-horror flick), but better than most recent efforts. --Bret Fetzer |
CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 2.5 based on 65 reviews)
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"STAB" is what i wanted to do after watching this peice of crap by SGT ROME (Philly, PA USA)  1 Stars
September 17, 2009
Let's just come out and say it, this movie is very not good. Not a single thing at all makes it a good movie. The acting is terrible and the effects are worse. The story takes the prize for being the most awful aspect of the production. It has every single cliché possible in a horror type movie film. I won't expressively list any but just think of one and I guarantee you will hear it in there (if you can make it through the entire thing). Lou Diamond Phillips shoots at the bats with a revolver and is hitting them with ease. It is things like these that make the movie so unbelievable. Which does not necessarily mean a poor picture; it is that the movie takes its self too seriously. Films like Tremors just have that ridiculousness to them that makes them fun. "STAB" does not have that. It is a chore to sit through the entire thing. This is a Sci-Fi (SyFy) channel Saturday afternoon garbage movie at best. And I'm not even a good critic, I thought Doom was good. Nobody liked Doom. The only reason I bought it is because a bat got into my girlfriend's apartment and we both thought that everything bat related was funny. Sadly we were wrong. I figured out that buying a copy was actually cheaper than renting it. I am not going to make your decision for you, so do whatever you want. Now you can't say that I didn't warn you.
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Lou Diamond! Save us all from the flying rodents! by Craig Edwards (By the sea in NC)  2 Stars
January 16, 2009
Bats (1999) Lock up the belfry for this particular offering. Let's start with the title. Four letters that tell you all you need to know. No "Kingdom of the." No "Earth vs the." Just Bats. A nice, direct title for an equally complexity-free film.
When two genetically enhanced superintelligent mutant killer bats escape scientific custody and begin infecting Texas' normal bat population, it's up to small town sheriff Lou Diamond Phillips and "batologist" Dina Meyer to save the day. If they fail, the infected critters will migrate all over North America, spreading death and destruction everywhere they go.
Aiding our heroic duo are the requisite stock characters for this kind of movie: the Sardonic African American Guy (Leon) who provides necessary comic relief with his stream of sarcastic comments; and the Crazy Scientist Guy (Bob Gunton) who started the whole mess in the name of science.
As these things go, this is a serviceable thriller. The bats attack with adequate frequency, and the characters fulfill their scripted functions, and are performed earnestly by the actors. The effects are efficient, though unremarkable. In the olden days, a movie bat was pretty much always a rubber specimen on a variably visible string. The really high tech ones were windup and had flapping wings that went "chaka-chaka-chaka." Nowadays a mix of digital effects and animatronics brings them to life.
The last Big Screen bat movie was 1979's Nightwing, with Nick Mancuso and David Warner battling the winged menaces. Both films obviously owe a lot to Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, but Bats has an equally strong inspiration in 1990's Arachnophobia, which had one large spider mating with a common house spider, producing scads of deadly poisonous little arachnids.
There are, of course, the expected plot holes. For example, a mine features prominently in the movie's plot. But it is never made clear just what kind of mine it is. A coal mine? A silver mine? A diamond mine? A gold mine? It's not dreadfully important, but is the kind of detail that spells out "sloppy screenwriting" when it's not provided. As a sidenote, Phillips assures his costars numerous times that there is only one entrance (and one entrance only) to this mine. But all mines that I have heard of always have a separate shaft to provide air circulation. Things that make you go `hmm.'
To wrap this up--Bats is a competently made, but not very involving PG-13 thriller that is probably best as a scary treat for teens or older children.
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waste by M. Martz (anchorage, AK usa) 1 Stars
January 06, 2009
This movie is truly a waste of time and money. You have better things to do than watch this drivel. My college buddy offered to buy my way into this film when I was hungover. It made me more sick and him less rich. The crappy effects, dialogue and camera angles are ridiculous. They didn't even try or care and I'm not sure how it made it to the big screen. This probably ruined Lou Diamond Phillips' career. If you like watching bad movies because they're bad then watch this one. But if you have any sense of intelligence, you'd pass.
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They drop the ball on this film. It could be so much more. by Ms. Susan Parr (LETCHWORTH, England) 2 Stars
March 31, 2006
Some B films are great and they have a cult following, but this B film will never have a cult following in latter years to come, because this film lacks a good plot. Every film need a good plot story or it will become a mess.
This film has got a weak plot story, but it not mess and it not scary-suspense action movie. It just scary looking bats killing people action movie.
If you people who saw this film and think this film is a scary-suspense action movie, you all are out of your minds.
If you people want to see a good scary-suspense action movie with a good story plot, see JAWS.
This film is not bad and it not good. You people should see this film only once on cable and never see it again.
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Inflight moviemaking from the writer of The Aviator by Trevor Willsmer (London, England)  3 Stars
March 22, 2006
Bats may well be the second best swarm of bats threatens Texas town movie ever made and also serves as a timely reminder that the `acclaimed playwright' who wrote The Aviator is also responsible for more generic efforts like Star Trek Nemesis and The Time Machine remake. The major thing the film has going for it is that at least it knows its rubbish even though it does play it straight, even when the dialog is pure z-movie ("Yes, major - it was us!"). The characters are standard issue: Lou Diamond Philips is the small town Texas sheriff hiding a dark secret (he's an opera fan), Dina Mayer the bat expert whose insistence that she could never willing hurt a bat translates into killing hundreds of the suckers while Bob Gunton's the mad scientist who genetically enhanced the vicious little bloodsuckers. Why? "Because I'm a scientist. That's what we do."
Naturally, the bats head for the nearest town showing a revival of Nosferatu (it doesn't state whether its Murnau or Herzog, but clearly small town Texans have eclectic arthouse tastes), and this being Texas, where everybody knows everything about everything and immediately fill the streets with expendable extras for the obligatory Bodega Bay scene. Of course, these deadly bats only need to take one swoop and bite out of the bit players to take them out of the movie, but can swarm all over one of the leading players and leave them only mildly scratched, just as it's a well know movie fact that being attacked by any flying creature brings on a bad case of weird camera effects, and this one ups The Swarm's slow motion with a misaligned lens: once your image is distorted, you'd better have your affairs in order Junk, but watchable junk.
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