Bats: Human Harvest (2007)

Plot Outline: A group of soldiers set off to capture the terrorist Fazul who has escaped into a maze of caves in Afghanistan. However they encounter a scientist who has been genetically engineering bats and turned them into flesh-eating monsters.

The Review: I can always understand people wanting to make sequels to massive films. Despite sequels taking a bad rap overall, they are on the whole designed to make money - pure and simple. You can understand people wanting to make sequels to The Terminator, Aliens, Jaws, Spiderman, Transformers, Batman Begins, Die hard, etc, etc. But it's when people start making sequels to films that suck or that no one has ever heard of - that's when I start to have problems. Bats: Human Harvest is a sequel to little-known and rather crap Bats. Ring any bells? Didn't think so. It actually got a cinematic release but it wasn't any better than these dreadful Sci-Fi Channel flicks and so, shock of all horrors, bombed completely and faded into oblivion.

Bats: Human Harvest has absolutely nothing to do with the original at all. In fact I don't know what it has to do with anything because the script seems to have been replaced. Instead of the film being set in Afghanistan (and thus that conjures up images of arid deserts, desolate landscapes and dry, mountainous regions) it's clearly set in the Sci-Fi Channel's favourite shooting locations of Eastern Europe. That damned forest is the same one I've seen in nearly every Sci-Fi Channel creature feature not set in the water (see the Anaconda sequels, Pterodactyl, etc). Apparently the forest is so dense that satellite imagery will not work there and the Russians have been unable t penetrate it. However when you see how sparsely populated with trees the forest actually is, you wonder if the Russians just couldn't be bothered going there. There's not enough cover to hide behind, let alone block a satellite. What the synopsis fails to point out is that the film is briefly set in Iraq at the beginning and then the soldiers find out the secret location of the scientist and then head to Russia. I think it was just a futile attempt to "cash in" on the war in Iraq, if "cash in" is the correct term to use.

If you've seen one formulaic Sci-Fi Channel original, then you've seen them all. Literally the same films with different monsters, it's not even fun trying to spot the similarities anymore. The action sequences are so routine and devoid of any excitement that they're not really action sequences. The namely faceless cast just stand there and shoot their guns in the air. Then when the bats attack the cast just frantically wave their hands around as if they were swatting wasps away. The bats were added in post production so it would have been a laugh watching the cast pretend to be attacked during filming. The bats are largely just black blobs on the screen and because there's a lot of them, there's not a lot of detail on them and the swarms of them are just cartoony. In fact they're not really the main focus of the film and serve as more of a diversion with the scientist becoming the major villain of the piece. I hate it even more when human villains become the focus of these creature feature flicks because if I wanted to see humans fighting humans, I'd get a Steven Seagal film. I want to see creatures fighting humans. And I'm sick of seeing these monsters be located in Eastern Europe where soldiers or scientists have to track it down. Whatever happened to them attacking small towns in America like they used to do back in the 50s?

Final Verdict: A sucky sequel to a film no one saw the first time....say hello to Bats: Human Harvest.

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