As part of their honeymoon, Dr. John Beck (Stewart Moss, Raise the Titanic) and Cathy (Marianne McAndrew, Russ Meyer’s The Seven Minutes) tour the Carlsbad Caverns. Itching for a quickie, Cathy breaks away from the group to look for a humping spot … and proceeds to tumble into a crevice full of creepy-crawlies. Being a he-man hubby, John leaps to her rescue, but in doing so is bitten by a bat.

You know what happens next, yet you will watch The Bat People regardless. (Directed by Airport ’77’s Jerry Jameson, the film is known alternately as It Lives by Night.)

Allow me to spell out the obvious: John starts turning into a man-bat. The first thing that something is awry is when his eyes roll back in his head before hitting the ski slopes, and he shakes violently. Thanks to the facial tic, it looks like an uncontrollable orgasm every time it happens … and it happens a lot across 91 minutes: at the hospital, in a hot tub, while fleeing the police — you name it. Eventually, hairy hands give way to a full transformation into the titular (but singular) creature, which looks less like a bat and more like a Planet of the Apes denizen confined to the short bus. Adding insult to injury is that the changed doc likes to slaughter people — you know, like real bats do.

Michael Pataki (Dracula’s Dog) co-stars as a perverted sheriff who’s on to Mr. Beck’s crime spree, but really just wants to get into Mrs. Beck’s silky britches. Interestingly, Moss and McAndrew were married in real life, and their union remains unbroken today; not even this AIP stinker could kill it. Actually, for all its chintziness, The Bat People sent one career soaring: that of Stan Winston, here (in his first feature) credited as “Stanley” and eventually the Oscar-winning effects artist of Jurassic Park, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Aliens and other movies that illustrate he clearly got better (as did the gigs). —Rod Lott

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Two years after the events of the first film (yet only one year after the release of that hit horror remake), The Hills Have Eyes II sends a squad of U.S. Army National Guard trainees back into Sector 16, that stretch of desolate desert where the wild things are. In this case, “wild things” refer to the inbred family of radiation-mutated hillbillies who live in the mountain caves, yet kill largely out in the open.

Working from a script from Wes Craven (director of the 1977 original and its 1984 sequel) and son Jonathan Craven (Mind Ripper), Martin Weisz (Grimm Love) makes the movie look like it belongs to Hills 2006, yet doesn’t do quite the same thing, which would have been easier … and lazier. Instead, he ups the ante of gore and general discomfort, opening with a scene certain to have cleared its theater audiences of noncommittals, as a newborn who is clearly a product of mutant rape slimes its way out of the bloody orifice of a nude, bound blonde (Cécile Breccia, Starship Troopers 3: Marauder).

Competing with that most unconventional home birth for sickest scene are a forced French kiss from Pustule Man, a sledgehammer to the scrotum and, involving our likable-enough protagonists (Banshee Chapter’s Michael McMillian and the Prom Night remake’s Jessica Stroup), a port-a-potty surprise! The details of each, I leave for you to discover. That’s not to say every move Weisz and the Cravens made was a good one; no matter their intention, having one of the deformed cannibal clan members assisting the American soldiers smacks of Sloth in The Goonies: greasy kids’ stuff perfectly at home in PG family fare … and wildly out of place for hard-R horror.

Nothing in these Hills distinguishes itself from being a Wrong Turn sequel (to name-check another blood-drenched 20th Century Fox franchise). Not when one of the redneck mutants machetes an arm off a good guy hanging from a cliff, then uses that lopped-off limb to wave at the G.I. falling to his death. I get it. —Rod Lott

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