Memorable, crazy movie

As Good As It Gets

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

Two tribes on the reservation. One, the Maski, is protected by Deputy Youngman Duran (Nick Mancuso), and the other by Walker Chee (Stephen Macht). the problem is that Chee wants to mine for oil on Duran's part of the reservation in an area that is holy ground.High Priest Abner Tasupi (George Clutesi) has a solution and he opens the gates between life and death. It cost him his life - or did it, since he is not in his grave.Enter Phillip Payne (David Warner) with the answer to why animals are dying. He is a vampire hunter - vampire bats, that is. Can he destroy the bats before bubonic plague covers the area? Duran's girlfriend Anne (Kathryn Harrold) leads a group of Quakers on a camping and fishing trip when the bats decide they are tired of animals. The bats coming out of the night sky were really scary creatures. The Quaker men were somewhat unchristian in their efforts to survive, leaving two women to die, but they got theirs. The bat attack on the Quakers was so good, I watched it twice before moving on.Swine flu gets mentioned as a possible cause of death of seven priests, but it was plague. It is suspected that the priests stole Abner's body and got the plague from him.In the end, the bats were consumed the way they always are, with a little Indian magic, of course. Abner still won as the eternal fires will prevent mining.Mancuso, Warner, and Nacht gave good performances, and it was interesting to hear about bats through the ages.

This movie is beautifully shot in the breathtaking reservation area of Northern New Mexico. It has some really fine actors - some of them unfortunately wearing "Indian" pancake. And it has some really foolish ideas about, like, man, our cultural priorities. ...Man.Released at the tail-end of the first wave of "social consciousness" in the 1970s, "Nightwing" is a wicker basket full of that decade's mumbo-jumbo curios: fetishistic treatment of Native-Americans, kneejerk "environmental" shortsightedness and a relentless anti-Christian slant. In short, this pow-wow is drummed up straight from the Hollywood Hills stronghold; it so reeks of tapas-bar manifesto, the air around it practically bends light waves. The most amusing aspect is its application of what can only be called Carlos Casteneda Forensics: The tribal cop ingests some hallucinogenic roots to break the case. Cool! If this crap mindset didn't still blinker us so relentlessly, this nonsense would be amusing, as is the idea of "protecting" native lands from voracious oil exploration (and... gosh... tribal employment) by setting the canyons afire! Sometimes the most progressive ideas are the most bust-out stupid.Best scene: Some cardboard evil/cowardly honkies drive campers over their own to escape the hysterically funny mechanical bats.

Not that I can think of any others. In fact, the only other killer bat movie I know of is "Bats" and it looked really bad. This one though I liked...as a kid anyway. It used to come on HBO and Cinemax all the time when I was a kid and I watched it numerous times, it was a horror movie that was PG and easy to see, a rarity in those days. This movie is of course about killer bats terrorizing an Indian reservation. There are conflicts of culture and other messages of this sort, but for me it was the killer bats. David Warner is in this one as a researcher, and he has a rather good scene where he is stuck hung up in a most dangerous position. There is also another Indian, who I think was some sort of law enforcement agent or some sort of park supervisor who is also trying to find out what is behind the strange killings. There is a good scene where the bats attack this group in the desert and many other good bat attack scenes. There are also a number of scenes that may be happening or they may just be a hallucination.

"Nightwing" is two movies crammed together into one. Or story begins at an Indian Reservation where two factions are butting heads over the future of the tribe. One set of characters wants to preserve the ancient rituals and religion of the community, while others want to build new schools and hospitals to bring the tribe up to date with the rest of the country (One thing all the characters have in common, though, is their terrible haircuts). The controversy is centered over a mine where oil has been discovered- should they allow the oil to be tapped to provide precious funds to the struggling Native Americans, or should it lay undisturbed, as it holds some sort of relevance to the Indian priests in the area?All this seems to be fodder for a satisfying drama, but suddenly Englishman David Warner shows up and warns everybody of a vampire bat invasion (Although Warner is a stranger to the vicinity, he can relate to it's people because he too has a terrible haircut. Warner would go on to sport even worse hair in "Quest of the Delta Knights"). So now we've got a standard nature-gone-wild thriller in the middle of our technology-vs.-tradition drama. The two stories are tied together thusly: Apparently an old Indian mystic named Uncle Abner has summoned the bats to stop the oil drilling. Actually, he claims his plan is to kill everyone in the world, but he might a little overzealous. What do you expect of a mystic named Uncle Abner?Anyway, the bats go around infecting people with Bubonic Plague, and we're treated to some hilarious bat attack scenes. One stand-out sequence has the bats attacking some goofy campers. One nerdy guy panics and locks himself in his van. Another panicky nerd climbs under the van for safety just as nerd # 1 starts to drive away- splat! David Warner eventually locates the bats in scenes that were later copied frame-for-frame by the Lou Diamond Phillips' stinker "Bats". It turns out that their hideout is in the same cave where the oil is- D'oh! David's plan is to kill them with cyanide gas, but he fumbles around, drops it in the oil, and ends up hanging from a rope for a couple of hours, so the beefy sheriff with the worst hair cut of all saves the day by lighting the oil on fire. This kills the bats and also somehow renders the oil source unusable for the developers, which begs the question: Why didn't Uncle Abner just light it on fire himself instead of going through the trouble of summoning killer bats?The movie ends with the mountain looking like an L. Ron Hubbard book cover and the initial conflict isn't really resolved, so I envision a sequel in which the ambitious Native American's build a casino which is invaded by vampire prairie dogs.