Nightwing

Despite the fluttering efforts of its many thousand leathery predators, Nightwing (based on Martin Cruz Smith's first novel) never really takes off. It does inspire one or two moments of nausea, as the itinerant vampire bat colony emerges from a canyon on an American Indian reservation to dine on the living bodies of local campers. But Hiller's direction simply plods to a corny and unsatisfactory ending after getting bogged down in subplots concerning whale-oil prospectors, Indian religious mumbo-jumbo, and inter-tribal rivalries.