Bats the Ticket

If you're anything like me, you don't like the idea of being eaten alive by mutant bats. However, I did discover something almost as bad--a movie about people being eaten alive by mutant bats. This movie was 1999's "Bats", where the title probably resulted from late night brainstorming sessions at the producer's office where all of Hollywood's top minds were trying to come up with titles ranging from the Oscar-worthy (like "Darkness Descends on Man") to the catchy (like "Bats All, Folks!") and finally could not agree on something so they let one of the guys from accounting come up with the title.

This movie answers the question "what ever happened to Lou Diamond Phillips?" but it never answers a better question, which is "hey is Lou Diamond Phillips any relation to Neil Diamond?" Apparently, Mr. Diamond Phillips' movie career had a shelf life of a soufflee on a Texas sidewalk (yes my metaphors/similies need work). Here he plays a Texas sherriff with all the subtlety of a brick, and apparently has to work with a sexy lady scientist (apparently in films like this, M.I.T.'s graduating class would be like an NFL cheerleader convention) and of course her wisecracking comic relief black sidekick. In lousy horror films, the minute you see a black guy you just know the laughs will ensue! It makes me wonder why all the black people I know are holding back their hilarious one-liners. It must be because I'm not a sexy lady scientist!

Of course, like all bad horror films, this one had the attacks by swarming bats result from some scientific experiment (by a non-sexy lady scientist, as it turns out. Even an NFL cheerleader convention has to have an old, unattractive guy, apparently). I don't really see why it's necessary to show WHY the calamity of bat attacks happened. It'd be far more effective if the message was "hey, the bats are just going to mess you up for no good reason, that's life"--sort of like the Birds in Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds". Which was probably given its title by the same accountant who named "Bats".