Some movies seem genetically engineered to be bad. "Bats" appears to have been hatched at the lair of some mad scientist intent on unleashing low-rent "Jaws" knock-offs on an unsuspecting public. The filmmakers here have taken every cliche we ve seen ad nauseum in movies like "Piranha," "The Swarm," "Orca," and (my personal favorite) "Anaconda" and lazily inserted them into this flick with about as much regard for narrative coherence as your basic Eszterhas Special.

We begin with the typical intro-attack scene, as two dumb teens ("Did you hear something?") make out right before being devoured by an unknown creature. (Never seen that one before, guys.) Cut to brilliant bat-ologist Dina Meyer (who just happens to look like a Cosmo cover-girl) being called in to the po-dunk Texas town where the attack occurred. Local sheriff Lou Diamond Phillips (light years away from "La Bamba") seems shocked that the local doc thinks bats were involved, even though he's the one who brought Meyer in.

"Are you saying a bat did this?" he yells upon seeing the cheesy remains. Meyer assures him it's not possible, but since there's no movie if she's right, we get introduced to Mad Scientist Guy, who says he has been messing with bat genetics, forming a "perfect killing machine," yada yada yada, you've heard it all before.

Apparently Mad Scientist Guy cross-bred them with rabbits, because there are now millions of the suckers flying around the Texas countryside. Waiting for the bats to attack, Meyer punishes Phillips for his overacting by forcing him to listen to a monologue about her bat obsession. To wake the audience up, a swarm of bats fly in and attack their car until Meyer's surly assistant, Leon, shows up to wisecrack them into submission. Meyer uses her college education to deduce that the bats will soon attack the entire town, and as they try to get everyone indoors, the director stages some of the most laughable scare scenes in recent memory: one diner patron can't see that a three-foot bat is crawling across the counter until it is practically in his soup bowl; Meyer shoots up a rack of beef jerky trying to hit a bat; Phillips hides under a car until the driver pulls away, leaving him lying in the middle of the street. Surveying all the damage, Meyer screams, "NOOO!!", apparently realizing that she is making an even worse movie than her earlier "Starship Troopers."

Our heroes evacuate the townspeople and turn the high school into a bat-proof fortress. Phillips, inexplicably, puts on an opera record and plays it over the school loudspeaker, revealing his secret love for music. Meyer, of course, is fascinated. The bats attack the school, Phillips waits about three years before turning on the electric fence they just spent hours rigging up for protection, and Mad Scientist Guy goes nutso, confessing how he intentionally set his killer bats free to multiply over the entirety of North America. Why? No reason given. He wanders out into the street raving about how he can contol the animals, and the bats prove his point by ripping him to shreds. Meyer, Phillips, and Leon give a collective shrug before going back into the school.

The military gets called in to bomb the batcave, but first they must deposit some giant air conditioner gizmo into the roost, freezing the bats to death before they blow them up. Um...ok, sure. The brain-cell-deficient general decides to do this at night, while the bats are awake, and -- surprise, surprise -- the bats kill the entire troop. Meyer and Phillips decide to go into the batcave the next day to turn on the air conditioner and must wade waist-deep through a river of bat doo in the process. This scene pretty much speaks for both their careers.

They turn the contraption on, waking up, oh, two or three aggravated bats, who attack them both, ripping off Phillips' gas mask helmet. This is of no consequence, even though the reason he and Meyer wore them in the first place is because, according to Meyer, the guano fumes are lethal. So much for all that bat research. Up top, Leon prepares to blow the cave to kingdom come as Meyer and Phillips hurry to escape before the bombs go off, outrunning millions of flying bats by a good fifty yard lead. They make it out (what a shocker) with the decidedly unfrozen bats seemingly up in smoke. This begs the question of why they went down there in the first place, but a better question might be why anyone spent a dime on this perfectly awful movie.

Rating: two turkeys, and that's pushing it.

Scene to watch for: The vampire flick "Nosferatu" is playing at the town theater.

Things that make you go "Huh?": The government's answer to national security was going to be...killer bats?