CBS Sunday Night Movie: Vampire Bats, aired 10/29

Cafe Society
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Open spoilers ahead.

She’s baaaaaaack! And just in time for Halloween.

Back in April (http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=313682&highlight=locusts), I posted an OP about a made for TV movie called Locusts, starring Lucy Lawless. It was a true masterpiece of MST3000ability. A pregnant Lucy and her estranged husband had to battle a plague of nuclear mutant man-eating locusts. It did not fail to disappoint.

Last night I watched Vampire Bats. It was not quite as outrageous, but it had its moments.

The basic plot: School is back in session. A bunch of college girls with incredible asses get fully drunk and half-naked, then get mauled by man-eating vampire bats. Rabid mutant vampire bats, in fact. Everyone in town who wears a badge is convinced that drug-addled teens are on a murder spree. Lucy the biology professor is the only one who realizes the horrible truth: Bats. Rabid mutant vampire bats. With freakin’ laser beams on their heads.

While the local eggheads plan a wine and cheese party aboard a boat, the college kids plan a rave in an underground steam tunnel. Unsurprisingly, rabid mutant vampire bats with freakin’ laser beams on their heads turn out to love a good party. They attend both, killing and sucking blood out of their victims. Unsurprisingly, both parties turn out to be less than a good time.

The mayor, who bears an uncanny resemblance to a certain current US president, calls a meeting to see what can be done about the menace. The game warden suggests poisoning them. Lucy suggests studying them to find out what makes them tick. Of course Mayor Dubya wants to go with the plan that will get results, the plan which only Lucy and the audience know is pure folly. Needless to say, it is also the plan that fails.

As it turns out, the bats are mutants because they’ve been biting local deer. The deer have poisonous blood because they’ve been drinking the local water. The local water is a mutagent because Evil Corporations have been dumping Evil Chemicals into it. Turns out that the Evil Corporations own black vans, black helicopters, and even a black swamp boat.

At any rate, Lucy’s students come up with a way to kill the bats: Seems they’re attracted to bad rap music, or something like that. I guess that urban beats and echolocation go together like rabid chocolate and mutant peanut butter. So they will put speakers into the steam tunnels (remember where the kids had the rave?), and play some rap music. When all of the bats are in the tunnels, they will get flooded with hot steam, which no mammal can survive.

A perfect plan, right? Except when Lucy and the game warden are down there alone, hooking up the speakers, the game warden turns out to be the Evil Operative for the Evil Corporations. He hancuffs Lucy to a pipe and gloats. Lucy knocks him out with a broom (which she always seems to be carrying, because a good scientist always carries a broom). She grabs his keys, sets herself free, and escapes just in time. While topside, she expresses concern that the warden is still down there. As we hear the bats die, all concern melts away, and they all live happily ever after.

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The first comment I have about this movie is the interesting cast. The reason the mayor looked so much like Bush is because the actor, Timothy Bottoms, has played that role on at least three separate occasions. Lucy’s sister-in-law was played by Brett Butler. And the Scot in the Bayou swamp was played by none other than Craig Ferguson.

I don’t know much about bat biology, but I picked out a few Bad Science/Bad Physics moments.

-Lucy, the harried housewife, is trying to get her kids fed. She pours her daughter a bowl of cereal.The daughter says “Mommy, I want pancakes.” Lucy says “Not in this heat, I’m not making pancakes!” She then smells the milk bottle and makes a face. She grabs the cereal away from her daughter and says “Don’t eat that! The milk is sour! Pancakes it is, then.” I’m guessing she was in for a surprise when she read the recipe for pancakes.

-The college kids plan on having their rave in steam tunnels. This is during the hottest, humidest days of the year. Yeah, good plan. The only access is through a 3’x3’ chimney with a ladder. They figure it will be a great party if they can bring down a couple of couches and a giant screen TV. Somehow, they manage this. And yet they never notice the bat infestation until the party is in full swing.

-Lucy wants to go out into the swamp (with her trusty broom) to capture some bats. Her students insist on coming with her, but she insists it’s far too dangerous. Duh. They show up anyway. Now from what I understand, rabies shots are a risky and dangerous thing. And yet every student “went to the free clinic and got rabies vaccinations this afternoon.”

-The bats, which had mutated to have extra fangs and extra thirst, had faces that almost looked like wolves. When they grabbed Manflesh, they shook their heads like carnivores. They never drank. And yet their victims were always completely drained of blood.

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Thank you.

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Don’t thank me. Thank the half-naked college girls with incredible asses. They discovered it.

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And people worry that not enough women are going into science!

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Dang it, I wanted to be the first one to question how they got the sofa into the steam tunnel.

So I’ll fall back on…why was Brett Butler the only one in town with a southern accent? And how the student body of this Louisiana university was interchangeable with the cast of the O.C.

The mayor may have looked like W, but he was otherwise a clone of Evil Mayor from Jaws. I kept expecting him to say that they couldn’t close the beaches just before 4th of July.

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Then perhaps you can fill us in on what the function of a steam tunnel is. Maybe this is a “moo” point, and I’m not really an expert on the guts of buildings. But does a steam tunnel really exist just to be filled with steam? To what end? And are they really big enough to host a large party?

Exchange students.

Yes, except the mayor from Jaws didn’t have a Texas accent.

I also thought it was funny how the police didn’t even examine the body of the first victim before making arrests, and it took a university professor to ask what sorts of wounds the victim had.

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Damfino. But getting a sofa down that tunnel would’ve been fun to watch.

Yeah, the police sure caved in quickly.

Police chief: “Drug-addled college kids! Round up the usual suspects!”
Lucy: “hmmm…this body’s definitely been gnawed on by animals.”.
PC: “oh. OK.”

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I was considering watching this, if I had known there were half-naked college girls with incredible asses it would have been a lock.

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CBS Sunday Night Movies are usually a good bet, especially if you make a drinking game out of them. Keep an eye out for next week’s Category 7: The End of the World. I’m counting on some Spring Break bikini action. And apparently a hurricane will break one of the faces off of Mount Rushmore. How cool is that?

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I live in South Florida, I’m a tad weary of hurricanes right now, so I’ll have to give that one a pass.

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And how, exactly, does a hurricane make it all the way to South Dakota?

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Well, if I told you that, you’d never watch the movie, now would you?

(And you have the nerve to ask that in a genre in which locusts can fly from San Diego to Omaha in a little over an hour. Have you considered that it might be a MUTANT hurricane? Huh? Have you?)

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Hitchhiking.

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In the real world, where steam tunnels have more than one access point, it might be possible to host a mid-sized party. Steam tunnel exploration at older universities seems to be a rather popular pasttime (try searching under “urban exploration”), though most universities have very stiff penalties if you’re caught.

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I so wanted to see this but a too-intense sense of responsibility forced me to turn off the electronica and do 3 hours of paperwork that I put off all weekend.

Next week though… I’m so there! :cool:

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What I really want to know:

Did Lucy have an extended phone coversation in her undies, ala Locusts?

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…I routinely make pancakes from a mix that only requires water.
Re: Steam tunnels

My old college has steam tunnels that run under the campus. They got so tired of kids trying to sneak into them and explore that they started offering incoming freshmen tours. They are just underground corridors roughly large enough to drive an SUV down. Kind of James Bond-ian evil under ground base but nothing spectacular.

Maybe the couch got there by magic… like that ornate table that was found in the steam tunnels of Montana State University where kids used to go play D&D. (Old UL)

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To be more specific, a rabid, mutant, half-naked hurricane. With an incredible ass.

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I always thought that Wilma was something. Granted she was no Judy Jetson…