Rish Outfield's reviews
This film might have nothing else going for it, but it is notable for one reason: one sequence was shot in the hometown of yours truly, Rish Zedekiah Outfield.
In fact, it DOESN'T have anything else going for it. Everything about this movie is terrible, including the title. It steal liberally from a hundred and one earlier, better films (The Birds, Them, Piranha, Gremlins, Aliens, Jaws, heck, even Kingdom of the Spiders), and manages to get lamer by the minute. Oh, and each unbelievably contrived line of poorly scripted dialogue is worse than the last bad example, which makes me wonder if this is a different John Logan than the co-writer of Gladiator and Any Given Sunday. Makes me afraid for Star Trek 10.
This movie sucked, boys and girls. I don't know if the story was laughable and the dialogue was groan-inducing, or if it's the other way around. As usual, the bats only harm the characters the script calls for, the rest can handle themselves. Have you ever noticed that Bob Gunton always plays the same character? Again we have one of those characters that are enamoured with the creatures and get their. . .just desserts when their creations turn on them. Wow, I'll bet this was hackneyed when D.W. Griffith made movies. The camera work and MTV editing are as if filmed by an epileptic on a pogo stick (or, for you PC hounds, like Michael Bay on fire in a centrifuge). Many times, I marvelled at what I was seeing. It was all such crap! But then I thought, wait a minute, am I looking for a diamond here among all the rocks? Why not just look for a pretty rock? Well, the lighting, for the most part, is really good, actually. There's one good thing. The bat effects were occasionally passable, but usually just lazy typical CGI. Actually, the puppet bats were even faker-looking than the CGI bats. So what do I know? Needless to say, Dina Meyer is hot. But she, nor any other detail, makes this film worth seeing.
Best Scare: Bats ARE scary, kids. But you wouldn't know it from watching Bats. They're either silly-looking trolls on rods, or their fuzzy blurs only seen for a quarter of a second. The bats on "Gilligan's Island" were more frightening.

The tyranist's thoughts
When this hit theatres last year, I dreaded going to see it. Well, time passed and I missed it in the theatre. Lucky me, we now have a rated R version on DVD to check out. Still, after viewing the rated R version, I can't figure out what they had to cut from this bland, mediocre affair to get a PG-13.
You know this story. We all know this story. It's been done thousands of times. Something goes horribly wrong (or right depending on whether you're Bob Gunton or not) and some species of animal--in this case bats--are now smarter, more aggressive, and like the taste of humans. So in come the specialists to stop the epidemic. Whether it's a big bug movie, revenge of the insects, or swarming small animals of some sort, this is rarely done well. In fact, off the top of my head I can only think of one instance of this that I loved for more than the camp value and in the short making-of feature on the DVD, the cast and crew repeatedly referred to this as an homage to The Birds. Well, it isn't The Birds but then neither is anything else.
I will say that Dina Meyer was pleasant to look at as always and Lou Diamond Phillips wasn't all that bad. Bob Gunton (who I will forever despise because he was Warden Norton in The Shawshank Redemption) was his usual slimy evil self. The dialogue, plot and production values weren't all that bad either.
I guess what it comes down to on this movie is the fact that it is just plain average. There is nothing very special about it at all. The effects weren't great but they weren't terrible. The story was pretty straight down the middle. The acting, script, everything, was average. Maybe that is why everyone hated it. We are always looking for something exceptional, something that jumps out at us and this just didn't have anything positive or negative that I could dwell on. Except for the editing. I had a headache about two minutes in from the ludicrously fast-paced editing that occurred whenever there were bats onscreen. But fixing that wouldn't have made the movie any better, just less headache-inducing.