MY NAME IS SCOTT FOY AND I PAID TO SEE KING RALPH

The folks over at Stomp Tokyo have started a new website devoted to b-movie news and they asked me if I would be willing to help out by providing a little news write-up every few days written in my particular prose. So now in addition to this column, you can also get the latest news in the world of bad movies from a fine fellow who goes by the moniker of Chadzilla as well as my own news, views, and skews on the wild and wooly world of schlock. So feel free to check out www.badmovie.net (not to be confused with www.badmovies.org which is another fine bad movie website) and keep up to date on the latest b-movie news. Also, be sure, if you haven't already, to check out my guest review of OCTOPUS 2: RIVER OF FEAR over at Stomp Tokyo. Yep, I'm in-demand lately. Next stop, a line of neckties just like Bill O'Reilly hocks on his show.

BAT GUANO

Spiders. Snakes. Insects. Rats. Bats. Sinister animals that dwell in the shadows or creep around in dark crevices, these are the beasts that generate the most primal terror and revulsion in man. They are the creatures Hollywood and lore often affiliate with the forces of darkness. Usually they are shown lurking about in an attempt to create a creepy atmosphere or simply to gross the audience out. In some cases, the figure of evil will transform into the creature itself or have the ability to command them. And sometimes they mutate with horrific results or just simply begin killing indiscriminately, sometimes in large numbers. Countless horror movies have been made about this menagerie of the animal kingdom, often with less than successful results.

Killer spiders of varying proportions have been the subject matter of such movies as ARACHNOPHOBIA, TARANTULA, KINGDOM OF THE SPIDERS, and most recently EIGHT LEGGED FREAKS. The fear of snakes has been exploited in movies like ANACONDA, SSSSSSS, VENOM, and countless recent direct-to-video movies. There's no shortage of movies about lethal insects of every kind ranging from THEM! to THE SWARM to BUG to THE NEST to MOTHRA. Films such as WILLARD, BEN, RATS: NIGHT OF TERROR, and OF UNKNOWN ORIGIN have focused on the squeamishness many have when it comes to rats. But this column isn't going to be about those movies or those animals. No, I'm going to focus on the ones about those "flying foxes." The reason why will become apparent later on. Trust me, this column is going to serve a useful purpose to society this time out.

We begin in the year 1933 with a film called THE VAMPIRE BAT. I haven't actually seen this particular film with my own eyes, but I have done my research. A small, sleepy German village (a.k.a. the back lot of Universal Studios.) is being plagued by a series of murders believed to be the work of a vampire, due to the victims being drained of blood and having those all too familiar puncture wounds on their necks. More a murder mystery than a horror movie, it all turns out to be the work of a mad scientist who uses his pet bats to commit murders for him. His motivation for killing these people is apparently never really explored and the bats are mostly used as props and given very little actual screen time. The movie would probably be totally forgotten today if not for it starring a pre-KING KONG Fay Wray. The general consensus on THE VAMPIRE BAT is that the film is neither particularly good nor especially bad.

The same cannot be said for the next film, which again I have not had the displeasure of seeing, also using the mad scientist manipulating bats as murder weapons. This one stars the original batman himself, Bela Lugosi, and is called THE DEVIL BAT. I have yet to find a review that's even remotely positive regarding this 1940 stink bomb. Lugosi plays a mad scientist who seeks vengeance against the wealthy family that fired him through a diabolical plan. That plan involves him electrically enlarging bats and training the bloodsuckers to kill the wearer of a particular perfume/cologne which he himself devises ways of dousing his victims with. Well, that certainly qualifies as diabolical. You gotta give him that! One would think it would be simpler just to shoot them or stab them, blow their house up, or even run'em down with a car, but who are we to argue with a mad scientist hell-bent on revenge?

An apparently even worse sequel called THE DEVIL BAT'S DAUGHTER was made six years later. This one deals with the evil scientist's daughter being plagued by nightmares of her vampiric father and how his ghost is trying to possess her and make her drink the blood of the living. Apparently neither bats nor the plot of the first film have anything to do with this film. So, if any of you thought pointless sequels to bad movies that have virtually nothing to do with the original was actually a by-product of late 20th century cinema, here's proof it was going on long before the 80s.

I can say that I've seen 1974's CHOSEN SURVIVORS once in my very early childhood when it ran on TV, but since I was probably only about 3 or 4 at the time, I can barely remember it. The film has since become a "lost" film that has never been released on home video and is nearly impossible to find a copy of and if you do it certainly won't be of the best of quality. Heck, that showing on ABC that I saw may have been the last time it ever got shown anywhere for all I know. That's too bad because I remember it scaring me. Then again, at this time in my life I was terrified of The Count from Sesame Street. Still, this is considered one of the better films to have practically vanished from the face of the earth.

The plot involves average citizens being forcibly rounded up and brought to a subterranean base located within a mountainside. Upon arriving, they are shown footage of nuclear blasts going on topside and are informed that they have been chosen to survive the nuclear holocaust and help rebuild civilization. Then the soldiers leave them behind and the trouble starts. Computers malfunction, claustrophobia sets in, and it turns out that the base was built next to some vampire bat caves. Swarms of bats begin to get in through the air ducts and kill them off. Now the survivors must choose whether to die down below or chance it on the surface. In the end, the soldiers return and its revealed the whole thing has been a psychological test to observe the "chosen survivors" under extreme duress. It really is a shame that this film hasn't seen the light of day in nearly 20 years. I know I wouldn't mind seeing it again now to see if it still holds up after all these years.

1974 was also the year that gave us THE BAT PEOPLE a.k.a. IT LIVES BY NIGHT. While the film is primarily known as THE BAT PEOPLE, the title itself is quite misleading because it's really just about a guy that transforms into a were-bat. Actually, he transforms into a crappy looking werewolf that happens to have pointy ears. The look of the man-bat is quite awful and isn't even so bad it's funny. This is all the more shocking because the make-up effects were by a young Stan Winston. The film, for those who give a damn or didn't see it when it was lampooned on Mystery Science Theater 3000, is about newlyweds who go spelunking in Carlsbad Caverns for their honeymoon where the husband, a bat specialist, gets bitten by an ordinary fruit bat and, for reasons never explained, begins transforming into a were-bat. All you need to know about the overall quality of this film is the fact that it is currently ranked #73 on IMDB's Bottom 100.

Kinda ironic if you think about it. The killer bat movie from 1974 that a lot of people would like to see again is virtually impossible to find, but the one that nobody likes is readily available. Sorta like Traci Lords' movies. The movies starring Traci Lords you'd like to see are illegal and the Traci Lords' films that you can see should be considered a crime.

In 1979, NIGHTWING, based on a popular novel, hit the big screen with a resounding "Thud!" The problem with NIGHTWING is that there are basically two different movies going on in this film at once and neither one is particularly interesting. Movie #1 is about an Indian reservation's internal conflict as to whether they should sell out to an evil oil company, (Has there ever been a modern movie with a non-evil oil company?), that has discovered oil in a nearby mountainside mine. One faction wants to reject the corporation and preserve their traditional way of life and the others want to use the oil companies' cash to modernize. Movie #2 deals with vampire bats terrorizing the small Indian community in New Mexico and, to make matters worse, they're infected with the Bubonic Plague. So how do you tie Movie #1 to Movie #2? You introduce an old Indian shaman named, and I swear I'm not making this up, Uncle Abner, who uses some Native American mojo to summon the bats to do his bidding. In this case, his bidding means to kill everyone involved with the oil company, all that oppose him, and, what the hell, all life on planet Earth. Uncle Abner is very ambitious in his anger. In one of those great coincidences that can only happen in a lousy b-movie, the bats have set up shop inside the mine where the oil is, thus leading to the big fireball finale where the oil is set ablaze to blow up the bloodsuckers. The bats are dead, the oil is destroyed, and one is left to wonder why didn't Uncle Abner set the oil on fire in the first place instead of having to go the highly complex, mystical Rube Goldberg route. Perhaps Uncle Abner watched THE DEVIL BAT one too many times?

Alas, NIGHTWING may be the most well made of the killer bat movies, which is a sad statement because it really isn't very good, save for a few goofy moments and an over-the-top performance by veteran character actor David Warner as an overly melodramatic bat hunter. Personally, I'd like to see a remake of this movie about a swarm of bloodthirsty, plague-infected bats menacing a casino on an Indian reservation. Now that would be box office gold!

Another ferocious flying mouse movie wouldn't grace the silver screen again until Halloween of 1999. Unfortunately, that movie would be BATS. Watching BATS was a sad experience for me because I loved the goofy premise and every now and then the movie showed promise, but ultimately it just ends up being not unwatchably bad and not so bad it's good, but just simply lame, very lame actually. BATS comes to us from the same director of CARNOSAUR 2! Sometimes you have to wonder if producers ever actually look at a director's filmography before they hire them.

For the record, the premise of BATS is that yet another one of those pesky mad scientists, this time government funded, has created a virus that makes bats smarter and more ravenous. The virus can be spread from bat to bat so their numbers will automatically multiply whenever they come in contact with other bats, which they are pre-conditioned to seek out. The plan being to use the bats as a military weapon by introducing infected bats into enemy territory where they contaminate other bats and thus create a small army of winged killers. This sounds an awful lot like the plot to PIRANHA only with tweaks that still doesn't make it any better. As ludicrous as this bat plan sounds, something like that may have come in handy in the caves of Afghanistan. Or maybe not. The scientist behind it has continued his experiments even after the military has scrapped the program and now they've gotten loose. Only a sexy bat expert, played by Dina "STARSHIP TROOPERS" Meyer doing a poor woman's Linda Hamilton, and local sheriff Lou Diamond Philips can save the sleepy town of Gallup, Texas and civilization as we know it. Coincidentally, this region of the country happens to be, in one of those amazing coincidences that can only happen in a crappy b-movie, a diefledermaus mecca. Oh, let us not forget that Meyer's assistant is the obligatory wise cracking (And not a single one of those cracks is even remotely funny!) African American sidekick and, prepare to bust a gut with laughter, he happens to be scared of bats. Oh, sure, if you are scared of spiders would you take a job working with a spider specialist?

And lest not forget BATS also has a really moronic subplot involving the bumbling military and their half-assed attempt to save the day. They may have been the same platoon that was in the Americanized GODZILLA. What is it about the military in movies that has them either being portrayed in a jingoistic manner or as gung-ho idiots or as jingoistic, gung-ho idiots?

For a movie like this to work it's either got to be truly scary (i.e. JOHN CARPENTER'S THE THING) or really creepy (THE BIRDS) or it has to take itself seriously yet be self-aware of it's inherent goofiness (TREMORS) or just be an all out zany monster mash (EIGHT LEGGED FREAKS). The problem with BATS was that it failed on all four of these levels. Instead we get bat attack scenes that are poorly conceived consisting of a series of zooms and whooshes in a desperate attempt to mask the film's low budget and avoid any gore that might have cost the film it's PG-13 rating. Ironically, an R rated cut of the film is available on DVD as if a little more red is going to make it better. Later in the film we see Meyers and Philips wading in a giant river of bat guano in a scene that is pretty much a metaphor for watching BATS.

Which brings us to the inspiration for this particular column. While surfing a page listing upcoming video releases I stumbled upon a title that caught my attention - FANGS. I immediately headed over to IMDB to look up this FANGS. There I found a 2001 listing for FANGS with the alternate title of BAT ATTACK. The plot outline was just one sentence: "It's the attack of the killer, genetically-altered bats!" It starred Whip "Bit Player" Hubley, Tracy "Daughter of Ricky" Nelson, and Corbin "Please make another L.A. Law reunion movie" Bernsen. Upon further pointing and clicking, I would come to learn that the film's director was one of the producer's of the sitcom Family Matters. The writer of the film is a man whose entire writing credits consisted of TV sitcoms including such notables as Three's Company, The Facts Of Life, Family Matters (What a shock!), Silver Spoons, and (HOLY #@$*!) Mama's Family. Mama's Family?! How the hell did somebody who wrote for that show ever go on to do anything in the field of scriptwriting ever again? There were only two reviews for the film. One was very brief and very negative without being very specific and the other just sounded like incoherent drunken rambling. There was even a trailer link to view, but it was of poor quality. All I could make out for certain was that this was clearly a low rent version of BATS.

Hmmm…a killer bat cheapie starring a bunch of low-rung TV actors directed by the man who gave the world Urkel and written by one of the guys who wrote for Mama's Family? HELL, YEAH! I had to see this movie and I wasn't going to wait for the video to come out on October 8th! I had to see FANGS now! Thanks to the magic of the internet I was able to obtain a screener copy of the movie. After viewing FANGS, I decided to make movies about killer bats the topic of my next column just so I could perform the following public service announcement to you my loyal reader:

DO NOT RENT FANGS!

DO NOT WATCH FANGS!

I can't begin to fathom the sheer number of people who are going to be suckered into renting this celluloid turd on the basis of its box art alone. That box art makes the film look like it's about vicious little bats up to no good. It lies! This is not a jolly good fangfest! While it may be about killer bats, virtually everything actually involving the bats takes place off-screen. Instead we have a never-ending sea of cutesy one-liners that wouldn't even be considered witty enough to be used on HeeHaw! You almost anticipate these jokes to be immediately followed by a few chords of a piano to help punctuate that something amusing has just been said. Ever see one of those Perry Mason TV movies? They were loaded with these sort of cute, little comments followed by the musical chords. You don't laugh and you don't groan when the jokes fly, you just sit there stone-faced as to how astonishingly lame it is and keep in mind that virtually every scene of FANGS has numerous failed attempts at humor and every last one of them dies an agonizing death. For example, the bat scientist has two young female student assistants. For whatever reason, they act like valley girls only without using the actual valley girl slang so not only is the humor lame, it's horribly outdated.

About 20 minutes into FANGS I was almost convinced that this film wasn't new, but actually some movie made in the 80s by NBC that they would have aired sometime around Halloween hyping it as "spooky fun for the whole family." William Katt and Tracy Pollan would have starred and the dad from ALF most likely would have played the scientist. Someone from the cast of Dynasty or Dallas would have done Corbin Bernen's role. It would have aired once and then never seen the light of day again.

SPOILER ALERT:

Okay. Take a deep breath. Here goes. If you honestly don't want the movie spoiled for you, then just skip ahead to the last paragraph. Otherwise, I'm about to save you 90 minutes and the cost of the rental.

A university scientist has apparently been genetically engineering a new breed of bat that is more ravenous. Exactly why is never really explained, but he wants to keep it all hush-hush. He's also developed some sort of ultrasonic sound device that controls the bats feeding instincts. Since humans can't hear the tone, this plot device is visually manifested in the form of a remote control device with two lights on it. When the green light is on, the bats are calm. When the red light comes on, the bats instantly go into a feeding frenzy. Somehow the bats get out of their cages and kill the doc before escaping into the night.

The death of the scientist is not actually shown on camera, which is no surprise because none of the deaths are ever shown on camera. A more honest title for the movie would have been OFF-CAMERA BAT ATTACK! In fact, the bats only kill three people and a dog, which is very tame even for a PG-13 horror flick. To give you an idea how bloodless the movie is, the scientist's dead body is shown in a brief shot of a body facedown with torn clothes revealing pink wounds. He appeared more tenderized than mauled. Still, this one brief shot is probably the whole reason for the film's PG-13 rating. There's no profanity, no sex, no nudity, no cleavage, and no kissing. What is this supposed to be, a family film about vicious, killer bats? If not for the dance scene and the girl with the camcorder, you'd think this thing was made by the Amish.

The bats themselves are brought to life through a combination of obvious puppetry and even more obvious CGI. When you actually do see the bats attacking, it's either really blurry or you see people with a toy bat stuck to them. You come to realize that maybe you're better off not seeing the actually attack scenes. If you wonder why there aren't any still captures from the movie accompanying this review, it's because there simply isn't anything worth capturing. What am I going to show you, a shot of the camera panning away from where a character is getting mauled by bats? A still of animated bat blurs? Corbin Bernsen with a toy bat stuck to his face? Okay, maybe I should have gotten a still of that last one.

Anyway, Whip Hubley is the recently widowed town veterinarian who apparently likes to snoop around crime scenes without permission. His teenage daughter looks like she could be Miss Teen USA and also talks like a valley girl minus the lingo. She's also obsessed with filming everything with her digital camcorder and has a dimwitted boyfriend who is supposed to be a computer wiz despite being about as bright as Spiccoli from FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH. She pretty much leads him around on a leash.

Tracy Nelson is the plucky police detective investigating the bat killings. She's flanked by an annoying fraidy cat cop who has never seen a dead body and is scared of the sight of blood. As if there's any blood in this movie! Hell, there's hardly any bats! She and Whip end up crossing paths and, of course, start off their relationship by having the cutest arguments. They reluctantly end up investigating the bat attacks, the scientist's research, and mystery of love all the while engaging in non-stop cute/nauseating little asides.

Enter Corbin Bernsen as the obligatory evil rich guy who is accumulating the town's land, by any means necessary, so that he can build expensive housing and a golf course to attract the upper crust of society and thus become even wealthier and snobbier. He has the local sheriff in his back pocket and even aids in his schemes to forcibly evict people and even has a head goon, played by the really fat guy who looks after Tony's father on The Sopranos, who in turn has a pet pitbull. Corbin plays his role with less subtlety than one of the snobs in CADDYSHACK. Not since BREAKIN' 2: ELECTRIC BOOGALOO has such villainy been put to film!

We come to find out that there's a shadowy figure using that red/green device to essentially command the bats to attack specific targets (i.e. Corbin Bernsen & his henchmen). The old Clue Club cartoon had more compelling mysteries!

To give you further examples of how poorly written this movie is, our heroic vet explains in detail how bats secrete this chemical into their victims that acts as sort of a mild anesthetic that calms the victim making them less reluctant to struggle. That's really interesting especially since every fatal off-screen bat attack has the victim screaming his lungs out. I love it when the screenwriter does some scientific research and writes it into their screenplay, yet neglects to actually apply it. This factoid is further rendered meaningless when the only on-screen death occurs as we see, via a shadowy silhouette through a window, the crooked sheriff thrashing wildly as the bats swarm him.

More bad comedy: immediately following that scene of the sheriff's dying shadow, it cuts to a parking meter where we see the "TIME EXPIRED" thingy pop up accompanied by the musical tone of what sounds like someone slamming their arm on the piano keys. Whimsical, huh? I didn't think so either.

Then there's the big Apple Blossom dance that Mr. Evil Yuppie is using to hard sell his wealthy clients into buying real estate complete with a huge tabletop model of what the new posh community will look like. He has also rigged the Miss Apple Blossom Pageant to guarantee his daughter will win. You'd think it would be obvious that the contest was rigged since his daughter was the only contestant. Well, right on cue as she's being crowned, the bats attack in the second tamest killing frenzy ever put to film. During the minor chaos, in true bad movie fashion, someone falls through the model mock-up in slow motion. Finally, our heroes suddenly start tossing tinfoil confetti into the air causing the bats to get confused and fly away. There was an explanation as to why shiny things confuse bats, but I frankly don't care to explain. Just trust me when I say this whole sequence is atrocious. As Bernsen's clients flee, he angrily utters the line "People are demanding their money back!" I firmly believe that line will accurately reflect the opinion of a lot of people after October 8th.

However, this one sequence does mark the only appearance of any minority actors in the film and, wouldn't you know it, they're out-of-towners. The movie is set in the stateless town of Scottsville, whose town motto could be "The Whitest Place On Earth." Also, it seems the whole reason the film included the greedy developer's daughter was for a scene moments later where we see her covered in the bright blue, for comedic effect, band aids on the phone whining about needing plastic surgery ASAP. Mama's Family was a laugh riot compared to this movie.

Skipping ahead to the exceptionally lame Scooby Doo ending, Bernsen has been kidnapped and tied up inside an old barn by the mystery man who is controlling the bats. Our heroes are also there, having figured out who he is and where he's taken Bernsen. The mystery man then reveals his true identity and it turns out to be the scientist who promptly explains how he faked his death using the corpse of a homeless man so that he could begin his vengeance, using his genetically engineered uber-bats, against the evil rich land developer who, many years earlier, swindled his father out of his farm causing dear old dad to commit suicide. Much like Uncle Abner, this guy has gone to way to much trouble to accomplish something that could have just as easily been accomplished with a firearm. He presses the button and the bats enter the barn and go into the absolute tamest killing frenzy ever put to film. Our male hero punches out the scientist while his ladylove unties Corbin who has a plastic bat stuck to his face. Whip pushes the button again causing the bats to become docile and sets a bomb to blow up the bat-filled barn. As the timer ticks towards zero, the mad scientist runs back into the barn to save "his babies" and gets blown up along with them. I think they blew the majority of the budget on the barn explosion.

The bats are dead, the crazed scientist is dead, Mr. Evil Yuppie goes to jail, and everyone else celebrates the end of this nightmare. We just have one last scene where we see Whip and Stacy on their honeymoon spelunking a bat cave (If only he'd get bit by a bat and turn into the monster from THE BAT PEOPLE!) just so the movie can end on one of those unfunny cutesy moments that permeated this crapfest. Then, finally, I celebrate the end of this nightmare!

Wait! I have to mention the song during the closing credits, which sounds like a song Cheap Trick would have recorded back in the 80s. Check out these lyrics: "We got an attraction! We got a chemical nuclear reaction! It doesn't get any better than this!" I would definitely dispute this last part. Not since the closing theme to MEGAFORCE have I heard such a stirring glam rock medley! I always love when the song in the closing credits has absolutely nothing to do with anything that has preceded it, except maybe finding some insipid way to inject the movie's title into the song, and doesn't even match the movie's tone. Then again, this song really sucks so it does fit the movie.

Then, as the credits came to an end I see a listing for the company that is responsible for this flick. So I decide to head over to the homepage of Porchlight Entertainment and come to learn they specialize in "wholesome entertainment" such as SHILOH 2: SHILOH SEASON and NIGHT OF THE TWISTERS. Good God, this movie really was supposed to be wholesome family entertainment about a lunatic who uses bats to savagely maul people to death for revenge! I got a family value the folks at Porchlight Entertainment need learn about, it's called shame!

FANGS has already been unleashed in parts of Europe, Scandinavia, Asia, and Australia. Sadly, I wasn't in time to warn them. I attempted to translate a Dutch webpage with a movie review of FANGS and, unfortunately, it was only capable of translating a small amount of the text and most of what it did translate was in broken English. Even in broken English, I could fully comprehend what the reviewer meant when he described FANGS with this line - it is technical evil. It sure is.

AVOID FANGS AT ALL COST!

Keep in mind that this is coming from the guy who actually enjoyed the horrendous BENEATH LOCH NESS, so can you imagine how abominable FANGS must be? You have been warned! Heed my words!

So there it is, my tribute to the "Batsploitation" genre and warning to mankind. Actually, it's more like a tribute to movies featuring madmen who unleash killer bats. Either way, it's all rather depressing, huh? And how can I finish without mentioning BATMAN & ROBIN. While it wasn't actually a movie about killer bats, it was the movie that killed the BATMAN franchise so that pretty much makes it the quintessential killer bat movie!

MY NAME IS SCOTT FOY AND I PAID TO SEE
CHILDREN OF THE CORN II: THE FINAL SACRIFICE