Bats
1999
Louis Morneau
Gallup, Texas is a small town where people seem to be dying from bat attacks. CDC scientists investigate with help from the local sheriff, Kimsey (Lou Diamond Phillips). The bats are unusually smart and aggressive thanks to being genetically modified into intelligent omnivores in hopes of preventing their extinction. The military evacuates the town and gives our heroes only a couple of days to locate the central bat roost and destroy it, or else the town (and hopefully the bats) will be bombed into oblivion. It’s decided to try and trap the bats in a cave and freeze them to death. The military suddenly decides it would like to start blowing things up sooner rather than later. The bats would just like to continue eating people.
With the rise of the internet and the easier access to information, animals are less of an unknown quantity and thus less scary. Films eventually had to rely on more and more outlandish versions (2-Headed Shark Attack (2012) for example) of animals to draw any kind of attention. So on that level I appreciate Bats. It’s very straightforward. If it had been made in the 1970s when eco-horror was more popular, I can’t imagine it would be much different.The biggest flaw in Bats is that it front-loads all the horror and action and eventually just runs out of steam before limping to its grand finale. There is a message about man not interfering with nature, but Bats knows its audience is primarily there so see flying mammals attack people
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