I won't do a résumé of the plot, but I don't understand the awful reviews. The science is plausible enough (I have a degree and I've worked in science for twenty years), the special effects aren't fantastic, but work well enough (this is fiction after all?) Scary in parts and witty dialogue. The lead characters were all likable (bad guys excepted of course). This is a fairly routine creature feature in some respects, but more believable than most in as much as the characters are neither stupidly heroic nor embarrassingly cowardly, the response to the emergency by the public and the authorities is also quite realistic. The sudden appearance of such numbers of bats is a bit of a stretch and some of the claims made by Dr McCabe are a touch too much, but other than that and the ultimate cause of the bat problem everything else works OK, for me at least. Mostly though, I had fun watching the movie and didn't feel my intelligence was insulted.

An expert named Dr. Sheila Casper is brought in when "Bats" begin killing animals and people in a small town in Texas. Some bodies are first found all chewed up, and we discover the killers are large bats who have been injected with something thanks to a mad scientist Dr. Alexander McCabe. Those bats attack and infect a large number of other normal bats, and that's when it becomes feeding time. Whatever the scientist did to the bats he was testing gives them the ability to sense things that normal bats wouldn't, and also gives them the thirst for human blood. We see the bats attack our main group of characters, as well as the entire town until Sheila realizes the only way to stop them for good is to freeze them. Will this attempt to end their reign of terror work, or will the mutated bats live on and kill everyone in sight?'Bats' is pretty much an average "animal/mammal attacks" type of horror movie. It really gave nothing too special other than a few moments. Those moments which work are the scenes in the small town when the bats attack the townsfolk. We get nice location shots of them attacking a bar, a grocery store, the outside of a movie theatre, etc. That was really well done. Where the movie fails is it's ending portion. It drags on way too much in which the experts and Sheriff Emmett Kimsey tries to kill them. Plus an added plot point of making it that the government was creating killer bats as weapons in war or something fell flat. I don't know, I thought it was really silly.Acting was pretty good I thought. Lou Diamond Phillips as the Sheriff and Dina Meyer as the expert did a good job. The stand-out performance goes to Leon as funny guy Jimmy, he had some funny one-liners and delivered them perfectly. I'd recommend 'Bats' if you like these kinds of horror films where animals or birds attack. It wasn't bad, but could've been better.5/10

"Bats" had its theatrical run and was widely distributed on rental VHS/DVD. Videostores carried multiple copies which got rented fluently. Yet from the looks of it - its rating on here - most people thought this was bad. Boy, have they not seen 'bad' yet. Things would get a lot worse in years to come with these type of films. For one thing, try watching the alleged sequel to "Bats" called "Bats: Human Harvest". The thing was made in 2007, for TV and then dumped to DVD as well. Go watch it; it's about 5 times worse than this film. Then come back and tell me which is the bad film out of those two. Or go watch "Fangs" from 2001 (starring Corbin Bernsen). It's the silly version of "Bats". I tell you, things can get a lot worse than this modest piece of killer bats entertainment. It even stars Lou Diamond Phillips and Dina Meyer. In 'worse' movies, you can't even count on a cast like this anymore. So why the complaints & puss-poor ratings on here?I've seen quite some crappy horror-movies already, and you can say what you want about "Bats", but it's not a bad movie. Clichéd? Yes, kind of. Seen it all before? Yes, most likely. But the production values are more than just okay. It's well made. It looks good. Good camera work. The acting is more decent than what you normally can expect from a movie like this these days (like stuff produced by Sci-Fi Channel, The Asylum, need I continue?). I've seen much, much worse special effects when it comes to the CGI used in this one. And there are actually some cool shots of animatronic bats to be admired (from puppets with full body movement to close-ups of their heads with moving ears, grinning teeth and blinking eyes - it's always a kick to see SFX artists go the extra mile on this). The film's fairly fast-paced, keeps you going and never gets boring. It's basically a B-movie that looks damn good, sort of like stuff similar to "Tremors" (a fine early 90's monster movie classic) and its sequels. Or if you bump down the ladder a bit, you'll find a lot more (lower budgeted) genre outings telling pretty much the same story ("Skeeter" from 1993 comes to mind).Of course "Tremors" works better on a variety of levels and "Bats" isn't as great by a long shot. For one thing, it misses some wit, and that black guy (Leon playing Jimmy Sands) trying to provide it didn't do a lot of good either. Still, a fun popcorn-movie for the somewhat less demanding horror-fan. If you have this feeling that genetically altered killer bats might amuse you, then ignore the low rating on here and just watch it.Now, can someone recommend me a better movie with a whole bunch of killer bats in it?

Bats, a film that should have premiered on the Science Fiction channel on cable, somehow got a theatrical release. If it had been made fifty years earlier I can definitely see Boris Karloff or Bela Lugosi in the part that Bob Gunton plays as the mad scientist.The scariest thing about Bats is not the creatures themselves although they are the ugliest looking things this side of the Black Scorpion. The scariest part of the film was Bob Gunton's portrayal of the mad scientist who created this race of killer omnivirous Bats. He's identified as working for the Center For Disease Control. I was watching this figuring out how this creep got government clearance.Yet Gunton is the most enjoyable thing in this film. And you got to love the fact that he had all these government facilities to work with, he's not hidden away in some laboratory in an old castle the way Karloff and Lugosi used to be. He's bred this race of flying fox bats from Indonesia which are aggressive to begin with and they've taken up residence in a bat cavern in Lou Diamond Phillips's county where he's the sheriff. After several suspicious deaths with mutilation, the cause is identified and zoologists Dina Meyer and Leon Robinson are brought in to clean out the bat cave. If you care about how and if they do it by all means watch the film and the hint is, think blob.Bats will never go down as a great science fiction classic, but it does have a certain campiness to it. And Gunton is a hoot.