Plot Details: This opinion reveals major details about the movie''s plot.
"All Heathville loved Paul Carruthers their kindly village doctor no one suspected that in his home laboratory on a hillside over looking the magnificent estate of Martin Health, the doctor found time to conduct certain private experiments, weird terrifying experiments."
Bela Lugosi is one of cinema's legendary actors. After a successful career on the Hungarian stage, Lugosi filmed Universal's 1931 adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula, the most famous of all of the story's adaptations. Unfortunately, Lugosi was type-casted onscreen and had Lugosi finding it difficult to make money. He wound up making a number of quickie low-budget features before finally ending up in two movies by infamous "worst director," Ed Wood: Glen or Glenda and Bride of the Monster. The Devil Bat was one of Lugosi's most successful independent productions, and was even followed by a loose sequel and a remake.
The story is as follows: Dr. Paul Carruthers (Lugosi) is a chemist who had developed a perfume that made his employers very rich, but Carruthers received little money from the product that he created. He begins a series of experiments involving bats, creating a prehistoric-sized enlarged bat and a specially-designed aftershave lotion with a scent attracting said bat to the necks of the rich, greedy family members. Reporter Johnny Layton (Dave O'Brien) and his photographer 'One-Shot' McGuire (Donald Kerr) come to the town to get the story behind the deaths. Scenes involving Lugosi fall into the horror/mystery genre, while the reporters' scenes are generally patterned along fairly comedic lines.
The Devil Bat is overall an entertaining mystery with little scares, but a lot of fun, and some intentional laughs. Far from being one of Lugosi's best films, it's not one of his worst, either. O'Brien's performance is interesting, as it shows that he is not the terrible actor viewers would believe him to be after viewing his most famous work, sensationalist "education" piece Reefer Madness, in which he plays a pot smoker who is driven to insanity and murder, telling one dealer to play the piano "FASTER! FASTER!" before beating another to death in the same sequence. In The Devil Bat, O'Brien is fairly credible as the straight man in the light comedic mystery portion of the film, attempting to produce a photograph of the "Devil Bat" by purchasing a stuffed bat and having his photographer set it flying on a string in order to take a picture of it, forgetting to take the "Made in Japan" tag off. However, Lugosi, as always, stands out as the best actor in the film.
The Devil Bat is not always top quality in regards to filmmaking -- the editing when the bat is let loose to kill is bad, not just the first time the sequence is shown (which would have implied missing footage), but every time, and obviously because the bat is of a size removed from reality, it appears fake except in closeups, in which we switch to a live bat. Far from the level of clumsiness found in Lugosi's later collaborations with Ed Wood, The Devil Bat is pretty decent in regards to low-budget independent films of the era, and should be pretty entertaining to fans of the film's genre and star.
The Legend Films edition is the one to go with here. The print is as good as it can possibly be, restored from the best possible elements (according to a previous review of the DVD, film preservationist Bob Furmanek provided rare 35mm source elements for the transfer, while missing elements came from a high-quality 16mm source), and while, like the film, it is not perfect, this is possibly the best anyone is likely to see the film. Colorization is photo-realistic, keeping in tone with color films of the era. The DVD includes both black and white and colorized prints, and trailers for Plan 9 from Outer Space, Night of the Living Dead, Reefer Madness, House on Haunted Hill, Carnival of Souls, and The Little Shop of Horrors. This edition is distinguished by having a black cover, not the cheap purple cover shown at the top of this page. The image is a close-up of Lugosi with a large, demonic-looking bat hovering above his head.
Epinions.com periodically updates pricing and product information from third-party sources, so some information may be slightly out-of-date. You should confirm all information before relying on it.
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2008 Shopping.com, Inc.