A Bulgarian court has fined environment officials for letting producers of the Sylvester Stallone movie “The Expendables 2″ film inside a cave filled with hibernating bats, environmental campaigners said Thursday.
Parts of the Hollywood action blockbuster featuring Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis and Jean-Claude Van Damme, were shot last November in the the Devetashka Cave in northern Bulgaria.
But the noisy filming in the cave should never have been allowed as it put thousands of hibernating bats at risk, said the campaign group Green Balkans, which took the matter to court.
The supreme administrative court in Sofia, upholding an earlier lower court decision, ruled that allowing filming in the cave near Lovech was “incompatible with the law on protected territories,” Elena Stoeva, an expert with Green Balkans, told AFP.
The cave is one of the three most important bat habitats in Europe, she said.
The environment ministry’s local branch, which allowed the filming, was to be fined between 500 to 10,000 leva (255 to 5,100 euros, $330-$6,630), she said.
Only about 8,500 bats were counted in the cave after Stallone’s visit, compared to 33,800 several months before, bat experts said, describing the film crew’s presence as “vandalism.”
The animals were subjected to stress, loud noises from heavy machinery and construction works, bright projector lights and crowds of people that kept them awake when they should have been hibernating, one expert noted at the time.
“The (court) decision will have a preventive effect on other similar cases of violations,” Stoeva said Thursday.
Filming in Bulgaria of “The Expendables 2,” which was released in the United States in August, was also marred by the death of a stuntman during a lake scene involving an explosion.
Stallone filming in Bulgarian bat cave illegal: court
