"Bats, Dr. Casper. Bats."
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scioscribe and I decided to watch a pair of B-movies, Bats and The Big Clock. The latter is tonight, the former last night.
"So you're a bat scientist?"
I knew I was in for a treat when before the movie even started, the title card for Bats flipped upside down and roosted. I felt even more certain when attack bats appeared within the first two minutes of the movie. And by the end of the totally incomprehensible yet ineffably delightful opening sequence, in which I think bats attacked a train and then violently ejected a kissing couple from a parked car by hurling them through the windshield which possibly made the car explode, I was in a state of bliss which only increased throughout the rest of the movie.
"Are you saying some kind of bat did this?"
Bats is the movie equivalent of every book in Grady Hendrix's Paperbacks From Hell. It stars Lou Diamond Phillips as a sheriff in a cowboy hat and Dina Meyer as a bat scientist, plus her assistant (wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with a bat skeleton), a mad bat scientist, and some bat experts from the CDC, all of them turning in reasonably good and 100% committed, straight-faced performances, which makes everything 100% more hilarious. I have no idea how they got through the entire shoot without expiring of laughter, given that approximately 25% of all dialogue consists of the word "bat."
"Bats, sheriff. I work with bats."
Everyone's personality consists of various aspects of their relationship to bats. The good scientist loves bats, wears a bat charm, and has a bat-related backstory. Her assistant is sensibly afraid of bats. Lou Diamond Phillips is stalwart in the face of bats. There is flirting by means of transferring a bat into a cage. Everything is bats, except for the part where Lou Diamond Phillips explains that he's an opera fan so we can have diagetic opera music scoring the sequence where they attempt to bat-proof a high school. It's glorious.
"Bats can be anywhere in a hundred mile radius. That's their range."
Many earnest bat facts are stated, and it is made very clear that these are no ordinary bats. They are omnivorous attack telepathic ultra-intelligent gremlin bats, engineered as weapons because, according to the mad bat scientist, "Because I'm a scientist. That's what we do." No one finds this explanation the slightest bit odd.
"We think this was done by some sort of... bats."
Bats attack cars, plastering themselves all over them like bat mache. They attack Main Street. They stalk people. They hover in mid-air to jeer at people. Sadly, they never actually fly off with anyone, but other than that my desire for bat action was more than satisfied. So was my desire for random explosions. In this movie, things explode at the slightest pretext. In fact, I think the bats might also have Firestarter powers because a lot of things explode and burst into flames that really shouldn't.
"If you blow it up the bats will scatter!"
This movie's entire budget was apparently spent on beautifully designed bat puppets for close-up shots and Lou Diamond Phillips (good choice), so background shots of bats often appear to be a bunch of Halloween-style black paper cut-outs. In fact I am pretty sure that is exactly what they were. We envisioned the crew's kids cutting them out, perhaps with the incentive of getting a bat puppet after the shoot was over.
"We'll freeze their little bat asses."
scioscribe remarked that the film strangely resembled Dante's Peak, but with bats instead of a volcano. We promptly envisioned the blockbuster movie Batcano, about a volcano which ejects bats. But it would not be better than the actual movie, which is a perfect example of what it is.
"Our bats must be infecting other bats with the virus."
You want to talk about leaning into a premise? Bats leans into its premise. Watching it, I can't offhand recall an hour-and-a-half span of time when I was happier.
"You don't want to die choking on no batshit fumes."
Free on Amazon Prime
"Bats."
scioscribe and I decided to watch a pair of B-movies, Bats and The Big Clock. The latter is tonight, the former last night."So you're a bat scientist?"
I knew I was in for a treat when before the movie even started, the title card for Bats flipped upside down and roosted. I felt even more certain when attack bats appeared within the first two minutes of the movie. And by the end of the totally incomprehensible yet ineffably delightful opening sequence, in which I think bats attacked a train and then violently ejected a kissing couple from a parked car by hurling them through the windshield which possibly made the car explode, I was in a state of bliss which only increased throughout the rest of the movie.
"Are you saying some kind of bat did this?"
Bats is the movie equivalent of every book in Grady Hendrix's Paperbacks From Hell. It stars Lou Diamond Phillips as a sheriff in a cowboy hat and Dina Meyer as a bat scientist, plus her assistant (wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with a bat skeleton), a mad bat scientist, and some bat experts from the CDC, all of them turning in reasonably good and 100% committed, straight-faced performances, which makes everything 100% more hilarious. I have no idea how they got through the entire shoot without expiring of laughter, given that approximately 25% of all dialogue consists of the word "bat."
"Bats, sheriff. I work with bats."
Everyone's personality consists of various aspects of their relationship to bats. The good scientist loves bats, wears a bat charm, and has a bat-related backstory. Her assistant is sensibly afraid of bats. Lou Diamond Phillips is stalwart in the face of bats. There is flirting by means of transferring a bat into a cage. Everything is bats, except for the part where Lou Diamond Phillips explains that he's an opera fan so we can have diagetic opera music scoring the sequence where they attempt to bat-proof a high school. It's glorious.
"Bats can be anywhere in a hundred mile radius. That's their range."
Many earnest bat facts are stated, and it is made very clear that these are no ordinary bats. They are omnivorous attack telepathic ultra-intelligent gremlin bats, engineered as weapons because, according to the mad bat scientist, "Because I'm a scientist. That's what we do." No one finds this explanation the slightest bit odd.
"We think this was done by some sort of... bats."
Bats attack cars, plastering themselves all over them like bat mache. They attack Main Street. They stalk people. They hover in mid-air to jeer at people. Sadly, they never actually fly off with anyone, but other than that my desire for bat action was more than satisfied. So was my desire for random explosions. In this movie, things explode at the slightest pretext. In fact, I think the bats might also have Firestarter powers because a lot of things explode and burst into flames that really shouldn't.
"If you blow it up the bats will scatter!"
This movie's entire budget was apparently spent on beautifully designed bat puppets for close-up shots and Lou Diamond Phillips (good choice), so background shots of bats often appear to be a bunch of Halloween-style black paper cut-outs. In fact I am pretty sure that is exactly what they were. We envisioned the crew's kids cutting them out, perhaps with the incentive of getting a bat puppet after the shoot was over.
"We'll freeze their little bat asses."
scioscribe remarked that the film strangely resembled Dante's Peak, but with bats instead of a volcano. We promptly envisioned the blockbuster movie Batcano, about a volcano which ejects bats. But it would not be better than the actual movie, which is a perfect example of what it is."Our bats must be infecting other bats with the virus."
You want to talk about leaning into a premise? Bats leans into its premise. Watching it, I can't offhand recall an hour-and-a-half span of time when I was happier.
"You don't want to die choking on no batshit fumes."
Free on Amazon Prime
"Bats."
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Favorite moment: it might be a tie between "I'm a scientist, that's what we do" (all scientists design killer bats; everyone knows that) and a deranged bat puppet crawling across a diner counter to rip a patron's throat out. Also every time people successfully shoot bats out of the air.
Also everything.
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Also when Sheila tenderly ties her bat emblem around the neck of the CDC bat dude who just got killed by bats.
The bat crawling out of the exhaust pipe.
The bat dangling from the clothes line.
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This review brought me (and my schrodinger's bat) extraordinary joy.
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ahahahaha I'll do it with water and Fully Hydrate. :D
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I'm honestly not sure the actual movie would make me laugh as much as this review has.
P.
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Is the opera Die Fledermaus?
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For shame!
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I have got to remember this for the merhorse book.
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Excuse me, you said merhorse book.
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Do you have any arms left I can twist?
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(:D)
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A random bat (not made for the occasion, already had it), as this comment seems insufficiently batty so far:
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I remember seeing (renting?) a movie with this title, with Lou Diamond Phillips and Dina Meyer, involving dangerous bats.
But the movie you saw sounds even more fun than the one I saw.
I guess I'll have to check it out on Amazon Prime!
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:D
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Amazing, thank you.
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I keep meaning to ask, have you ever heard of, or watched, the movie Frogs? It has a similar kind of batshit (um...sorry) energy but also a very 1970s style. Because I'm arachnaphobic, it did really fuck my little preteen self up a lot for a couple scenes, but from today's vantage point, it's hilarious.
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