October 21–28, 1999

movie shorts

Bats

It’s a little depressing what’s happened to B movies. Where they used to places for directors like Sam Fuller or Robert Aldrich to do crazy things on a small budget, they’ve largely become cheapie Xeroxes of Hollywood pictures. You can’t really hate Bats, since it’s exactly what you’d expect it to be, but you certainly can’t like it. The characters are so thinly fleshed out and schematic they might as well be stick puppets. Sheriff Lou Diamond Phillips is Exposition Man: he gets to say things like, "So what you’re saying is, this is bats." León (the statue in Madonna’s "Like a Prayer" video) gets to act the minstrel-show fool, making googly eyes at the flapping hordes and yelling "You fucked with the wrong brother!" And Starship Troopers’ Dina Meyer (right) is the brainy scientist (yeah, right) who needs to learn that sometimes you have to stop being understanding and just kick ass. Meyer’s character is so much like Deep Blue Sea’s Saffron Burrows you can’t help but thinking how much more exciting, inventive, and funny that movie was than Bats (even if it wasn’t any more original). Here, digitally created bats swarm a small Texas town with the ardor of Alfred Hitchcock’s birds, but the movie is lifeless from the git. Quoth Lou Diamond: "You’re not telling me I’m up to my waist in bat shit." Yes, Lou, I am.

—Sam Adams