Bats – review

Directors: Scott Jeffrey & Rebecca Matthews

Release date: 2021

Contains spoilers

Also known as Bats: The Awakening, I will do something with this that I don’t normally do with films and quote the blurb (from it’s Amazon description, identical on IMDb): An alien virus that once wiped civilizations out in ancient times through out (sic) time has returned overnight by a mysterious thunderstorm infecting all the bats in the area causing them grow into grotesque giant carnivore man-eater monster bats and it's up to humankind to fight for their lives to survive or history will once again repeat it's self as it has thousands of years ago.

Got it… good… forget it. What a load of old rot but then, as we’ll see the film itself tries to layer itself with subterfuge. In fact alien viruses are never mentioned, nor the thunderstorm, nor past history and there is just one (that we see) giant bat and it is a man-bat… but we start with a tad of trespassing…

Nicole Nabi as Natalie

Two blokes, Jack (Marek Lichtenberg) and Drew (Ellis Tustin), and a lass, I think Natalie (Nicole Nabi), break into a house for beer and sex. You might have noticed I used rather British descriptors – blokes and lass – and that was purposeful. As they begin to speak, we get some awful American accents (one particularly bad) and this is the subterfuge I mention. This is a UK film but it pretends to be American, not just in accents but references to a ranch and calling 911. This is despite the fact that it is clearly shot in the UK countryside (indeed the house they’ve broken into has a Book of British Birds on display). Why? I don’t know but the accents are really distracting all the way through.

dead Drew

Nevertheless, there is talk of the area being abandoned some ten years before due to some kind of nuclear accident and the all-clear only being given a year before. The owners clearly never returned to the house. Yet somehow the electric is still connected (later we discover that the phoneline is also connected)… There is some chatter and then Natalie has sex with Jack, with Drew watching, and then Drew. Drew goes to the bathroom and is attacked and killed by a man-bat, which bites the neck it seems, Jack is attacked by a swarm of normal sized crap bats and finally Natalie is killed by the man-bat.

Nosferatu Village

Three weeks later and Jamie (Megan Purvis) is still getting over the fact that her fiancée Matty (Mat Sibal) died in a car crash. Mum (Amanda-Jade Tyler) (or mom – American accents and expressions remember) persuades her that Grandma (Kate Sandison) could do with support going back to her old house as they have been told there were squatters there – yes it’s the house from the prologue but who told them there were squatters? Indeed where have the bodies gone? Perhaps she got an unexpected electricity bill? (I’m kidding, after all the electric should have been disconnected). Anyway it’s a family trip with sister Amelia (Georgia Conlan) and dad (Ricardo Freitas) who all drive out in the one car. There is an old evacuation sign that signifies that we are in Nosferatu Village – not ominous at all…

behind you

Anyway, its daylight and all are fine (mention is made of the time of day later). Jamie and Amelia go for a walk – with Amelia taking and losing the car keys, inconveniently – and find an abandoned church, also with electricity, a strangely placed altar (traditionally they are not next to the church door) and more strangely with a Japanese katana on the altar (not remarked on but useful later, you can bet). Eventually Grandma goes to the attic (with suspiciously stone floor), stands in guano and is attacked and bitten by the man-bat. She escapes its clutches but the hunt is now on…

death, Scanners' style

The bat has what looks like thermal vision and yet also misses people hiding in the cold dark! The only other things to note is that the bite triggers a rapid onset illness (so, like the Nosferatu, a plague spreader), which causes the flesh to rot off the bone and the bat can release a squeal that can make a head explode Scanners style. Beyond this the family make some strange assumptions. Jamie is attacked by and kills a normal size bat and assumes it is the man-bat's offspring (hence it attacking them – despite this being after the biting of grandma) – the strange assumption is that a normal bat is its offspring (why wouldn’t they be man-bats?) Another one is that they have woken it from a hibernation, without considering that the squatters (hardly squatters actually, given they were in the house all of a couple of hours) had been in the house.

bite

So if this is sounding awful… well the accents are, the pretending to be in America is, and the plotting is. It is low budget, however I have to say that the man-bat outfit was rather fun… not Hollywood standard but certainly good enough to have been in more mainstream 60s and 70s UK horror (the normal crap bats did deserve the crap moniker though). Indeed the little bit of gore – exploding head and rotting arm – worked rather well too. If the filmmakers had allowed their actors to use their own accents and decided to bridge some of the bigger logic leaps this might have proven to be an ok little low budget horror – the absolute shame is that the worst elements they deliberately did to themselves. As for the man-bat – it has fangs, bites the neck, spreads plague, is likely a mutation but a separate species to humans and the use of Nosferatu Village indicates the direction of travel was deliberate.

A film that is its own worst enemy – 3 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

On Demand @ Amazon US

On Demand @ Amazon UK