Bat Outta Hell (originally released in 2013 as Like a Bat Outta Hell) tells the story of a crew of filmmakers (Marco Dapper, Dan Balcaban, Rachel Murphy and William Wensley) who mostly make their living shooting footage of surfers. They are hired to go deep into the South Australian wilderness for some job, and end up stopping in the tiny town of Nowhere Else. There, they encounter a strange creature: a four-foot-tall humanoid bat with a penchant for ripping off people’s faces.
This ought to be a simple story to tell, but is somehow isn’t. Bat Outta Hell is one of the most inept films I’ve ever seen. Its plotting, production values, and acting are all uniformly terrible, each scene revealing new depths of sheer awfulness. This is one of those films that we get that make me question the value of having all these theaters. It is baffling that we continue to allow films this terrible into our cinemas. There are so many other movies we could be showing.
The very first scene that introduces the filmmakers has them out on the beach shooting footage of surfers. Except they aren’t really out on the beach, because it’s pretty obvious that the scene is made up of composite footage shot on a green screen. It looks terrible, and it’s only going to get worse from here. The bat creature they’re facing is a computer generated effect, and if these guys can’t make green screen look okay, they never really had a chance at creating a convincing creature effect.
But it is the storytelling that is most baffling. Maybe you could justify the awfulness of the production as the effect of a low budget, but that explain the sheer incoherence of the plot. This crew apparently set out without being told what they’re supposed to be shooting. Except one of them knows, and is just hiding it from the rest of the crew. No one in the crew actually likes this one guy, which makes it a continual mystery why they have him around in the first place. But anyway, this crew is working for a mysterious benefactor who apparently wants them to catch the bat on camera, but never tells to go out looking for it. That would make too much sense.
This plot is further complicated by a weird time jumping framing device that has the crew’s camera found some time in the future. This never really adds up, and ends up making the timeline a real mess. By the third act, it feels like the film is just jumping between scenes at random, never really building to a single narrative. The movie can’t even get its details. It opens on a scene in 1991, but a visual reference later in the film that points to that same event says it took place in 1990. This all ends abruptly, with no resolution or any meaningful forward direction. The fates of the characters are left up in the air, the story teasing a cliffhanger that isn’t in any way interesting or compelling.
And then Bat Outta Hell has the temerity to include text pretending that all of this is somehow based on real events. It includes text talking about how cryptid bats are real, and that they’ve been seen all around the world, and they’ve caused many deaths over the years. It’s all so frustratingly stupid. This whole tirade hasn’t even really covered everything that makes Bat Outta Hell so bad, but there doesn’t seem to be much point to going into all of it. Suffice it to say that this is the kind of movie that should never make it into our cinemas. We are insulting ourselves in allowing it room in our market.
My Rating:
