The fifth big budget Batman has the desired colon subname of 'Intimidation'. Now shooting Iceland and then Shepperton Studios in England, this movie will re-start the ailing franchise. Bale was a brave, but great choice, and now Neeson, Freeman, Oldman and Caine have joined the cast, expect a bit of class from the director of Momento and Insomnia.

Bats is for everyone who misses those old Roger Corman monster movies, only it has animatronics and computer effects instead of papier-mâché. The title pretty much sums up the plot: crazed bats are running amok, disembowelling people and cattle. Only beautiful wildlife zoologist Dina Meyer and stalwart sheriff Lou Diamond Phillips can save the day. Let's be frank: the scenario is ludicrous, the dialogue awful, the special effects unconvincing--try as they might, the bats just aren't that scary--but what does it matter? The movie rips along effectively. There's always a bat attack just around the corner and the director makes liberal use of all kinds of editing and camera effects, including adistorted bat-cam point of view that makes no sense at all but is pretty entertaining. Various scenes imitate Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, but lack even a hint of that film's eerie precision. The actors play it straight without trying to be particularly serious. All in all, Bats knows what it is--trash-horror--and accomplishes its ends with good humour. Not quite up to the standard of Tremors (still the definitive trash-horror flick), but better than most. --Bret Fetzer, Amazon.com

The most interesting--and entertaining--aspect of Battle Cry, a long, episodic World War II drama, is that it marked the debut of one Justus E McQueen, who subsequently took the name of the good ol' Arkansas boy he played in the movie: LQ Jones. He's only one of eight or nine marine recruits who divide the screen time with commanding officer Van Heflin and James Whitmore as a lifer sergeant named Mac, "just Mac", who ramrods their squad and also delivers the movie's overbearing narration. Unfortunately, the narration is necessary to maintain continuity as the CinemaScope production galumphs its way from rounding up the melting-pot cast to seeing them through basic training and sundry, mostly amatory misadventures in San Diego, to further training in New Zealand and finally to baptism of fire on Guadalcanal.

Trouble is, among the recruits only McQueen/Jones (whose job is mostly comic relief) and Aldo Ray (as a brawling lumberjack who's never known family life) have any charisma or acting chops--and that's not forgetting Tab Hunter, whose matinee-idol status at the time does not speak well for the 50s. Battle Cry is also a cardinal example of Hollywood's penchant for buying big, lusty, profane bestsellers (by Leon Uris, in this case) and then bowdlerising all the lustiness and profanity to appease the censors. Raoul Walsh, the poet laureate of lowdown gusto, does what he can in the circumstances, and as one of the first guys ever to direct a widescreen movie (1930's The Big Trail), he makes the battle scenes roar. --Richard T. Jameson