Somewhere in Chechnya, super evil Dr. Walsh (Tomas Arana) is sitting around with a mad-on towards the nation of his birth, the good old U.S. of A. We lied to him. We told him all men are equal when in truth only the rich and strong get the goods and the gains. Dr. Walsh was a 99 percenter before it became hip to be a 99 percenter. So, after our government cut his stem cell research funding, he defected and joined the enemy to help them make some WMD’s. What do you think he’s making? Nuclear weapons? Biological weapons? Devising ways to poison our water supply? Of course not. He’s genetically altering bats. Then I think the plan is to stuff the bats in empty missile containers and launch these missiles at the enemy and then have the missiles open up, the bats come out and then have the bats eat whomever happens to be nearby. Brilliant! The movie is called ‘Bats: The Human Harvest’, I’m told it’s a sequel to LDP’s ‘Bats’ from ’99 which was awful, and if what I have described sounds even worse, it’s only because it is.

Clearly we can’t let genetically mutated bats run around all willy nilly and stuff, so the gubment dispatches a hardcore team of their best Delta Force soldiers to bring the evil doctor back home from deep inside the former Soviet Union. Note that they aren’t aware of the mutated bats as of yet, but they will be soon enough. Leading our team is The Colonel, played by FCU legend Todd Jensen. We did an entire episode of Totally Twisted Flix dedicated to The Deaths of Todd Jensen, and had we known this show existed, it would’ve made the cut. The Colonel also has his right hand man Lt. Col. Martinez (Michael Jace) who has the misfortune of being African American in a semi horror movie. Just so you know, Todd Jensen + Black People divided by Horror Movie = Certain Death. There’s other members of the crew but I guess we should introduce the films principles, that being Katya (Pollyanna McIntosh), the Russian who works for the CIA and has a personal beef with the evil doctor, and Capt. Russo (David Chokachi), the super hardcore soldier who doesn’t play by the rules and hates team work and doesn’t follow orders. How he ascended to Delta Force with those psychological limitations is beyond us, but we will roll with it. Lt. Col. Martinez happens to be Russo’s BFF so Russo will also have a problem with the evil Doc in just a few minutes.

So our soldiers walk in the woods looking for stuff. You might want to get used to them walking in the woods because they do that a lot in this movie. They also do a lot of fancy solider talk and make soldier motions like the always awesome finger points to the eyes, the raised fist stop motion, and the wavy finger motion that means go. Thanks to movies like this I am well versed in soldier finger motions. Eventually they encounter the bats, which we gotta admit is probably the lowlight of this film called ‘Bats’. You see the bats are CGI blurry blobs and we never really get a good look at them, and as such they weren’t all that intimidating. Sure, they’d pick up a guy every once in a while, say a guy like Todd Jensen or the Black guy, and then drop them down on the ground in a bloody pulp, but that was the best the filmmakers could do for us and it wasn’t near enough.

A lot of other stuff proceeds to happen, with very little of this stuff having anything to do with mutated bats killing people, but know in the final wash it will come down the soldier who doesn’t play by the rules, to break the rules he doesn’t play by, to save us all. Heaven knows we don’t want bats stuffed in missiles. Nobody wants that.

First of all we’d like to give an FCU shout out to actor Mike Straub. We don’t know this guy personally, but we thinks he’s Bulgarian because he shows up in an awful lot of these Bulgarian shot movies we watch and in this movie they transformed this Bulgarian actor into Texas born Delta Force operative. I think his Texas accent might’ve been a little better than Pollyanna McIntosh’s Russian accent.

But back to ‘Bats: Human Harvest’ directed by Jamie Dixon, yeah, I guess it’s pretty bad. We could talk about the extremely suspect special effects, which is a little disappointing considering Jamie Dixon makes his money mainly by being a Special Effects guy… but I guess you still you need a few dollars to make even the most basic movie magic moment. We could talk about the stiff acting, the suspect accents, the soldier who doesn’t play by the rules which normally would get one kicked out of soldiering, the lack of surprises or creativity such as the expected deaths of Todd Jensen and Black People, the wacky concept of launching Bat Missiles, the tedium of watching soldiers walk in woods and engage in witty repartee using bad accents… We could mention all that stuff but the thing that really irks us here at the FCU about ‘Bats: Human Harvest’ is that the bats, as bad as they might’ve looked, weren’t even the focus of the movie. This was actually a procedural drama on soldiers walking through the woods using soldier talk. Admittedly the soldier talk sounded authentic, the finger gestures looked liked they belong, the soldiers reacted in ways movie soldiers normally react so I guess there was an advisor on set, but we were really looking forward to mutated bats wrecking stuff. We didn’t get a lot of that.

Oh well, it looks like if you are desperate for quality Batty entertainment, you’re still stuck with 1979’s ‘Nightwing’. And if you’ve seen ‘Nightwing’, you know that the Bat Genre is desperate for a winner.