I absolutely loved this movie. A young, Hot Nick Mancuso was definitely a bonus! :-) I liked how it delved into Native American lore...the visions inside the cave were awesome. The familiar faces of Stephen Macht and David Warner were also a plus. I can't believe I haven't seen this movie until yesterday. True, the story line could have been a bit better, but remember, this was made in 1979. They didn't have the tricks of the trade that the movie makers have now-a-days. The bats looked true to life enough to be convincing. The methods of the vampire bat hunter were a bit weak and..a bit silly. Would you lean over the top of a cave without being secured to something safe? YIKES! The music was great. Mancini scores always are. :-)

In this movie a educated Idian who has become rich wants to become richer by destroying tribal lands and ruin the environment by striping the area for the shale oil reserves, BTW you cant drill to get it you strip mine it out. An old Indian, Durans "granfather" calls on the spirits of the tribal ancients to bring a colony of Vampire bats to destroy the invaders into the sacred lands, Payne in a scientist and vampire bat killer who seems to hate them on a almost psychotic level then again there is the Van Helsing syndrome for the movie. Duran is the hero who tries to stop the mining and the killings with little success, Ann is his girl friend trapped in the dessert the only survivor of a bat attack(FYI: VAMPIRE BATS OR FOR THAT MATTER ANY BAT ARE NOT THAT Aggressive, ARE EASILY SCARED AND ALMOST NEVER ATTACK LARGE ANIMALS IE: HUMANS, UNLESS PUSHED, VAMPIRE BATS DO FEED ON CATTLE AND SOMETIME HUMANS BUT THEY HAVE ALL BUT NEVER BEEN REPORTED AS KILLING THEIR PREY EVEN IF IT IS PEOPLE) In the end Duran saves the girl, the scientist, traps the bats sets the oil on fire killing them, thus the land is free from being ruined by miners/oil hunters until the fire burns out as Duran says in a few hundred years. It is a good film made with 1970's fear of all thing not cute and cuddly but worth seeing.

******SPOILERS****** One of the main reasons that I like "Nightwing" is that the movie educates the audience about the subject matter in it. You learn more about Vampire Bats in just a five minute conversation between Phillip Payne, David Warner, the Bat investigator and Walker Chee, Stephan Macht, the Indian official then you learned about the same subject in all the movies that Hollywood made about Bats put together. The movie also gives you an interesting look about what I think is it's main subject; the mystical and religious as well as the cultural customs of the American Indians of the American South-West. The movie "Nightwing" has a dual story in it. Deadly Vampire Bat attacks on people and livestock in the South-West, the state of Arizona. There's an attempt by a big oil conglomerate, Peabody Mining, to buy up and strip mine a large section of two Indian Reservations, the Pahana & Maskie. This is being done with the help of a corrupt top Indian official, Walker Chee, in the Bureau of Indian Affairs. A number of cows and horses are found dead and the local farmers as well as government officials are left confused and baffled by what caused it. These incidents have attracted Phillip Payne who's a bat researcher or as he calls himself "The Exterminating Angel" to the area. Payne has been tracking down the migration of Vampire Bats since 1973 from South America Mexico and now to the southern part of the United States and he thinks that a large colony of Vampire Bats are responsible for whats been happening in the places effected with dead livestock and now people. There has also developed a number of deaths due to Bubonic Plague which Payne feel that the Bats are transmitting to both people as well as animals. Both the Peabody Mining Corp. and Walker Chee want to keep all this out of the news in order to protect their attempted land grab in the area.With nothing able to stop the "Killer Bats" advance as they attack and kill people and cattle almost undeterred as a last resort Indian Police Sheriff Youngman Duran, Nick Mancuso,tries something new to stop the killer bats. With the help of ancient Indian Mysticism that Duran learned from his friend and Maskie Indian High Priest Abner Tasupi, George Clutsei, he's able to stem the tide of the Vampire Bat invasion. Defiantly better then most of the movies about the same subject with it's focus on detail science and history instead of horror shock and gore. The rivalry between the upright and honest Indian Sheriff Youngman Duran and the corrupt and deceiving Indian official Walker Chee alone makes the movie interesting all by itself.The Bat menace in the movie was intelligently handled and the film tried as much as possible to keep the supernatural and mystical angle in check making it more real as well as effective. The final sequence of "Nightwing" in the deadly "Bat Cave" as Duran Payne and Duran's girlfriend Anne Dillion, Kathryn Harrold, were working against the clock, or better yet the night, to destroy the giant Vampire Bat colony before it woke up was nail biting and very effectively done. The scenes of the Bat attacks in the movie, there were only three, were believable as well as shocking even though the special effects back then, in 1979, were primitive to what they are in movies today. All and all "Nightwing"is one of the most unknown, it's almost impossible to find it on VHS today and it's never been released on DVD, and at the same time best movies about "Killer Bats" that you'll ever see.

"Nightwing" is two movies crammed together into one. Or story begins at an Indian Reservation where two factions are butting heads over the future of the tribe. One set of characters wants to preserve the ancient rituals and religion of the community, while others want to build new schools and hospitals to bring the tribe up to date with the rest of the country (One thing all the characters have in common, though, is their terrible haircuts). The controversy is centered over a mine where oil has been discovered- should they allow the oil to be tapped to provide precious funds to the struggling Native Americans, or should it lay undisturbed, as it holds some sort of relevance to the Indian priests in the area?All this seems to be fodder for a satisfying drama, but suddenly Englishman David Warner shows up and warns everybody of a vampire bat invasion (Although Warner is a stranger to the vicinity, he can relate to it's people because he too has a terrible haircut. Warner would go on to sport even worse hair in "Quest of the Delta Knights"). So now we've got a standard nature-gone-wild thriller in the middle of our technology-vs.-tradition drama. The two stories are tied together thusly: Apparently an old Indian mystic named Uncle Abner has summoned the bats to stop the oil drilling. Actually, he claims his plan is to kill everyone in the world, but he might a little overzealous. What do you expect of a mystic named Uncle Abner?Anyway, the bats go around infecting people with Bubonic Plague, and we're treated to some hilarious bat attack scenes. One stand-out sequence has the bats attacking some goofy campers. One nerdy guy panics and locks himself in his van. Another panicky nerd climbs under the van for safety just as nerd # 1 starts to drive away- splat! David Warner eventually locates the bats in scenes that were later copied frame-for-frame by the Lou Diamond Phillips' stinker "Bats". It turns out that their hideout is in the same cave where the oil is- D'oh! David's plan is to kill them with cyanide gas, but he fumbles around, drops it in the oil, and ends up hanging from a rope for a couple of hours, so the beefy sheriff with the worst hair cut of all saves the day by lighting the oil on fire. This kills the bats and also somehow renders the oil source unusable for the developers, which begs the question: Why didn't Uncle Abner just light it on fire himself instead of going through the trouble of summoning killer bats?The movie ends with the mountain looking like an L. Ron Hubbard book cover and the initial conflict isn't really resolved, so I envision a sequel in which the ambitious Native American's build a casino which is invaded by vampire prairie dogs.