Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema. This is Rob Lamb.
And I am Joe McCormick. And today on Weird House Cinema we are going to be talking about the nineteen forty horror thriller The Devil Bat, starring Bella Lagosi and Suzanne Karen, a movie where the one sentence plot submarine not only includes the phrase giant mutant bat, but also the word lotion.
Yeah that's right. Yeah. In this episode, we're returning once more to the nineteen forties. This is only our third forties picture on Weird House with and the first in a long time, following nineteen forties Doctor Cyclops and nineteen forty six is The Beast with Five Fingers. So I am excited to return to one of our least explored decades on the show like this. The thirties and the twenties haven't hit as much.
Yes, though, you know, some of our the sci fi movies we've done from like the thirties and the forties have been some of my favorites. Actually. Oh, I actually in fact came to the idea of doing Devil Bat this week by looking specifically for movies that are similar to the Beast with Five Fingers starring Peter Lourie, which I loved, and I was thinking, oh, I want something in that zone, and this is what I turned up,
and I think it's close. Beast with Five Fingers I think was a little more, you know, higher budget, a little more, a little more elaborate, had a little bit more class, but ultimately on I think the same frequency.
Yeah, i'd had more of a gothic flare. This one is more Middle America meets mutant bats.
Yeah. And while I would say that the plot of this movie is quite formulaic, like there was a pattern that's established with how each of the bat murders takes place that just sort of repeats and is the same way each time. It's almost like the setup to a joke, you know, where it's just like there's a very formulaic repetition until the inversion. It's like that. And yet at
the same time, the script isn't actually half bad. I think there is more kind of character and flare in it than you would get for a lot of similar movies from this time period. I'll also say for a horror movie from nineteen forty. I found Devil Bat to have a surprisingly lively pace after the first ten minutes or so, that is the opening scene. I don't know if you felt the same way. Rob opening scene is
almost comically dull. It's like they thought, you know what people want to see Bela Lagosi looking through a pane of glass for like three minutes straight while he microwaves a bat.
Yeah. Yeah, there are a lot of scenes of Bella Lugosi microwaving bats in this film, and you just need to be on board for that. But but then again, it's Bela Lugosi, and if you have to ask, you have to watch any actor do these scenes, it might as well be Bella because least you know he had, you know, even at this point point in his career, you know, he still had a lot of energy, a lot of charisma, and you see that in a film like this, where he's working alongside a lot of very
solid professional actors of the time period. This is not this is a low budget picture, but it's not like a zero talent picture. This is not the ed Woods end of the spectrum for Bello's career. But even with all these other like very perfectly, perfectly good and sometimes kind of great performances around him. He still shines and you still see that in him.
I totally agree. Yeah, Bella, Bella is the star. There's no question about that, which is it's always a good move to make the villain the real star of the movie. I like that choice here, and I think it works out. But also, as I was saying, I think even with the more mundane characters and the more mundane scenes, I think it's pretty lively, Like the pace really picks up once we meet the journalist character, and there's there's a good bit of snap and personality to the dialogue.
Absolutely, it doesn't have the times dull plotting pace that you encounter in genre pictures from these decades. So of course I had to look up this one in the Psychotronic Encyclopedia. Film and Michael Weldon, the reviewer, the author there. Look him up if you're not familiar with him. If you love weird films, you'd love the work of Michael Weldon. He points out that this was a Producer's Releasing Corporation or PRC film, and PRC was the quote cheapest studio
in the business, bottom of the ranking. Of the eleven Hollywood film companies active in the nineteen forties, they only lasted from like nineteen thirty nine to nineteen forty seven, and The Devil Bat was their very first horror film. It was also a success, so they followed it up in forty six with what Weldon refers to as a cheat sequel, which does certainly sound like a cheat because it concerns the daughter of bell Leegosi's character, while also, yeah, it's his daughter.
Can't recall him having one in this movie.
I know he has one now, So introducing the unknown daughter and then completely exonerating his character for all of his actions in the first film and blaming them on a new villain. This is a picture no spoilers. This is a picture where there's never any doubt that mel Legosi is plotting to murder people with mutant bats and doing it, and there's scenes with internal dialogue about it.
Yeah. In fact, I would almost say if there were any criticism I would make of the plot in this movie, the first one I would probably make is that the good characters are trying to solve a mystery, but you know the answer to the mystery the whole time. You know the answer before they even start investigating, so there's no attention for the audience in resolving the mystery, except like wanting to see what happens when Bella gets caught. But there's no ambiguity. Yes, he's sending the bats. We
know he's sending the bats. We watched him make the bats.
Yeah. Yeah, you completely derail everything about the first movie. So yeah, it's not supposed to be that great. It's supposed to be more of a psychological thriller, unless horror film. And I'm not even sure there are any bats in it. But we're not talking about that bats. I know, I know, but anyway, we're not talking about Devil Bat two or the bat daughter of Bat Devil. I forget what it
was called now. But Weldon certainly liked this one. He thought this one was pretty lively, and I have to say, given the low budget nature of the picture, I have to say, uh yeah, the pace is great and the bad action looks I thought surprisingly good. I know we're going to maybe disagree a little bit on the special effects in this film, but I went into it with
very low expectations for my flapping bats. I love any bad effects in a film from from Bad Puppets to Great Puppets, from bad CGI to just you know, mind bending CGI. I'll take any of it. And so I was expecting everything to be a lot more flippity and floppity, and I was pleasantly surprised that it was more believable than that.
It is better than the batpuppet in Suspiria. But that's not a high bar.
The bar is low. This sort of thing, I wouldn't.
It, But yeah, what will I say. I don't think it looks great. I don't think it looks realistic, but it it's fun. You know they staged the scenes.
Well, yeah, all right, I have an elevator pitch for this one. I think it'll make sense once we get into the plot. But it's breaking bad except with bats and after shave.
Yeah that's right. Yeah, it's if Walter White, instead of making methemphetamine was making bats.
Yeah, because you have a so you do have a similar plot with him, like like he was this brilliant innovator who kind of got jerked around by the moneymen and has a lot of personal pride and his scientific powers. But again, no math, just bats and after shave.
Yeah, I think a great villain. They always need one like characteristic sin of your seven deadlys, and in both cases the sin here is pride.
Yes, all right, let's go ahead and listen to at least some of the trailer audio here. I think this gives you some of the snappy dialogue as well. When an animal attacks a human, there's bound to be a lot of noise. A die is a scientist state, many things se into consideration a laymen, my too.
Beulook, ever smelled anything like this before? Founded in Don Martin's bathroom.
Yes, that's the same stuff that's been on every one of the devil Bat's victims.
All four of the murdered people had this lotion on them when the devil bats struck late.
And I'm afraid all these murders have affected you mind.
Now, My plan is to sit in the garden and when the killer makes one of those power dives a blasting. All right. Now, at this point you may be wondering, where can I see the devil Bat? This one apparently entered into the public domain a while ago, which may sound good at first, but this isn't necessarily a good thing, because while it means you can easily find a film like this in various streaming and physical formats, not all
of them are going to be worth your time. The best source that I'm aware of for the film is the twenty thirteen Keino Classics disc. You can get it on DVD or Blu Ray, mastered in HD from archival film elements, and that one also features audio commentary by film historian Richard Harlan Smith. I had every intention of viewing it in this format. They have this disc at Atlanta's own video drome, but then my week got super busy. I wasn't able to make it over there and rent it,
so I had to find a stream instead. I found a pretty solid stream of it. But I am going to rent the disc at some point from the drone and maybe dive in a little deeper, little forward facing research for forthcoming Bell Legosi pictures.
I do want to see a higher resolution version than I saw of the flat bats, the flat bats on the coat hangers.
Yes, all right, let's get into the people who made this film. Starting in the director's chair as usual, It's gene Yarborough, who lived nineteen hundred through nineteen seventy five, American producer and director who worked his way out. This is one of those those crazy Hollywood stories. A guy who worked his way up from being a chauffeur for like a producer, his to all the way up to
being a director. His directorial duties began in RCO's short subjects division, so doing a lot of shorts for RKO. This is about beginning back in nineteen thirty six, and then he went on to direct his first full feature for the Poverty Row Studio. This is the term for like the lower budget Hollywood studios Progressive Pictures in nineteen thirty eight, Who's called Rebellious Daughters.
Oh boy.
The head of that studio would then go on to found PRC, the studio behind this picture. So he did this film in nineteen forty, followed by I believe a few different PRC films Caught in the Act and South of Panama and forty one, and The Brute Man in forty six. That one starred Rondo Hatton. You know the if you've ever seen a picture of him, you know a very very famous character actor with an extremely unique look.
And even if you haven't seen a Rondo picture, you may have seen The Rocketeer, which features a henchman character who is modeled via special makeup effects to look like
a Ronde character. Okay, yeah so. Yarborough also directed for other studios during this time, and moved on to work for Monogram Pictures, which became Allied Artists in fifty three, and ultimately Universal Pictures, where he directed the nineteen forty six Rondo film House of Horrors and some of the lesser known but still quite successful Abbot and Costello movies, as well as multiple episodes of TVs. The Abbot and
Costello Show, which ran fifty two through fifty four. I don't know about you, Joe, but I often forget that there are all these Abd and Costello movie. There's something like thirty seven of them. Though I'm mostly familiar with it, and imagine a lot of you are only familiar with the ones that have monsters in the title, like you know, having Costello meet Frankenstein or whatever. He did not direct
any of those. He directed these various other ones that don't even necessarily mention Abbat and Costello in the title.
I've actually never seen any of those, but I know some of the core ones where they meet I don't know Dracula or Frankenstein, whatever. The main universal crossover ones are supposed to be pretty funny.
Yeah, I don't know. I don't think I've ever watched one myself. So Yarborough cut his teeth on quick and low budget film projects. He developed a great reputation and skill set for quick turnaround and this made it be natural for television. So he just ended up doing more and more of that, serving as a director for TV until around nineteen seventy one. His last feature film was nineteen sixty seven's Hillbilly's in a Haunted House. I believe
I've seen a riff tracks version of this. It features John Carradine, Lon Cheney Jr. Dasil Rathbone, and Merle Haggard. Merle Haggard, Well, yeah, it is Hillbilly's and a Haunted House. I think if memory serves, it's like a Nashville country act, you know, contemporary to the time, encountering creepy characters in a haunted house. I don't recall it being very good, but I remember there being some laughs.
Mama tried to make me not a hillbillyon a Haunted.
House, but it failed. Now the screenplay here is by John T. Neville, who lived eighteen eighty six through nineteen seventy American screenwriter with credits going back to nineteen twenty seven. He worked on a lot of westerns and adventure films with some crime and sports thrown in there. And there's like a boxing film called The Heart Punch, I think. But however, this in nineteen forty six is The Flying Serpent.
Seems to be They seemed to be the only horror films that he worked on, and The Flying Serpent is said to be very similar in plot to The Devil Bat, but with some sort of a giant Mesoamerican flying serpent instead of a devil Bat. And I can only assume this might have been at least some small influence on the much later cue The Winged Serpent.
Ah Okay, you remember. Actually there is a similar plot device to make a connection to another director who made a name for himself by working fast and cheap, Roger Corman's movie Not of This Earth, the one where the guy from another planet is trying to send people back, trying to steal people's earth blood because his home planet has been contaminated. But he's also got a suitcase that sends out this flying bat monster it's like an alien that I guess steals people's blood.
I like that one. There's a there's a really cheap kind of variation on this theme too, and the phantom creeps the a time's exciting, at times exceedingly dull, Bella Lugosi cereal for more or less this same time period, they're like robot spiders or something of that effect.
A couple times recently that's come up. Did you say there's a version of that that's like condensed that maybe we could watch for the show.
There is At some point it was cut down from like what did I would I say before something way too much from an extremely long serial format into a condensed film format. The probably may makes less sense, but is probably less boring. Okay, all right, So that was the screenwriter. The original story credit goes to George Bricker
eighteen ninety eight through nineteen fifty five. Worked from the mid thirties to the mid fifties, with his most notable works being A pair that pair of nineteen forty six Rondo Hattan Films, nineteen forty six is She Wolf of London, which was also directed by Yarborough, and nineteen fifty two's
macau all right, be getting into the cast. Yes, of course this is a Bella Lagosi film, and we've talked about Bella Lgosi at least briefly before, because we covered Plan nine from Outer Space, and I think in that one we said, this cannot be the first episode where we really talk about Bella. We'll have to come back to him. So I guess this is the episode where we go into more detail about Bella Lagosi.
Okay, because in fact, I think we recently re ran Plan nine from Outer Swedes, which of course made for a really fun weird house episode. But yes, Bella is barely in Plan nine and it's only a couple of scenes, so I can understand why we said that. So let's talk about him now.
Yeah, that was his last picture and certainly not his best picture. This is not his best picture either, but I think it's more fitting to talk about him here.
Yeah, Yeah, this is a good one.
Yeah, bell Goosie here plays doctor Paul Carruthers Lagosi lived eighteen eighty two through nineteen fifty six, legendary Hungarian American actor and classic horror icon who's of course best known for his portrayal of Dracula in the nineteen thirty one Universal horror film of the same name. I mean, it's pretty impressive. I think that all these years after that film came out, he is still like one of the stars you think of when you think of Dracula, like you, yeah,
you think of Christopher Lee. You probably think of Gary Oldman. Maybe there's one or two others in the mix, but probably not like I feel like, I feel like Bela Lagosi is still like somewhere in that top three for most film fans or oh yeah, or horror fans in general.
So Lugosi started out in Hungarian theater in silent films, before making his way to Germany and doing some silent films there, and finally making his way to America his May he made his way up to New York became very active in the theater scene there, mostly as an actor, but I think he did a little directing as well.
I don't have any details on that, but he also did some silent films there, and it's here that he landed the lead in the Broadway play Dracula in nineteen twenty seven, and then moved to la in nineteen twenty eight. I believe it's part of a tour of Dracula, and this is where he kicked off his proper Hollywood career. The next year, he appeared in Todd Browning's The Thirteenth Chair.
Browning would of course go on to direct Bella in that nineteen thirty one adaptation of the Dracula stage play, and this of course led to his many of his best known films, especially the horror films that remained such a central part of his legacy. Though we have to point out that he was typecast by all of this,
and I think accounts indicate that he was. Rather he felt limited by this, like he saw himself as a more versatile actor, but he was mostly relegated two horror roles and the scary Bella Legosi type characters that we think of today, and wasn't really able to break out of that. And we have to remember too and all of this that, yeah, as big of a film as Dracula was, as things like Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein were horror science fiction, these other genres were very much
considered further down the studio pecking order. But anyway, I had a number of notable films followed thirty two's Murders in the Rooue Morgue, White Zombie, and Island of Lost
Souls thirty four as the Black Cat. That's when we might come back to Mark of the Vampire thirty nine, Son of Frankenstein and the Serial The Phantom Creeps nineteen forty gave us the Devil Bat, followed by the likes of forty two's The Ghost of Frankenstein and the Corpse Vanishes, forty three's Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman forty eighth, Abbait and Costello Meet Frankenstein. This being his last A List movie and also his final portrayal of Count Dracula.
So I feel like the Devil Bat in the art of Legosi's film career is kind of positioned in the middle between his early apex with Dracula in the early Universal movies and then what would happen later in the fifties when he would end up working with ed Wood.
Yeah, the fifties were rougher, you know, including fifty two's Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla. That's at least one of the titles, and of course that trio of Edwood films. Fifty three is Glenn or Glenda fifty five's Bride of the Monster and fifty seven's Planned Nine from Outer Space. And during this period, in particular, understand he battled physical ailments, drug addiction for which he sought treatment, and financial problems. It is fitting, though that he was apparently buried in
that Dracula cape. You know, he ultimately, you know, he wanted to escape the legacy of that character to a certain extent, but he also fully embraced, like the star power, the lasting legacy of what that role meant.
I believe Devil Bat is not Belo SI's best performance of all time. It's not in his top top tier. But I would find Bella entertaining if he were sleepwalking. And so I love all of his scenes, even the ones where he's just like infinitely sniffing chemicals or looking through the glass. You know, he's great and all that. But the really good scenes are the dialogue scenes where he's like trying to get somebody to try on the
lotion that makes the bats kill them. He has so many hilariously overt like I am about to murder you with the bat lines.
Yeah yeah, so yeah. The charisma and the dallent shines through and One of the reasons again that planning from outer space is not generally considered her a good film is that Bella Agosie's barely in it. Like if he had been in it more, had he not died, you know, it would have been a better picture. Would it have been good, No, but it would have been a better picture. All right, Let's get into the supporting cast here, because we have some interesting characters here as well. We have
Suzanne Karen playing Mary Heath. She's one of the daughters of the main family, is involved in this pivotal fragrance company in the film.
Yeah, the plot is sort of so like Bella Legosi is trying to wipe out these two families who run this cosmetics and perfume company, and there's this long list of brothers he's working down before he gets to marry. And I guess the whole point is the audience is supposed to be like, no, you know, you can get all the brothers, but don't hurt Mary.
Yeah. Classic, you know, classic classic structure. Here. You know, you have your vengeful killer who either begins by killing characters you want to see die or at least you're neutral about, before working their way to the characters that you're more invested in. Yeah, and this is the one we're invested in. Yeah. So Karen was She lived nineteen twelve through two thousand and four American actress and dancer who also worked in the New York theater and on Broadway.
In Hollywood, she worked in I believe some Three Stooges shorts, as well as some various uncredited roles and occasional lead roles such as this. She was active on the screen from around thirty three to forty four, but also made an uncredited cameo in nineteen eighty four as the Cotton Club. I think she's good in this. She has very captivating eyes in a solid performance. Like I say, this is a film that may be low budget, but is filled
with very competent actors. Yeah, all right. The next one of note, ooh, this one's a real treat is the character Johnny Layton. He's your hot shot reporter looking into all these what turned out to be mutant bat murders and for a time they think prehistoric bat murders. Played by Dave O'Brien, who lived nineteen twelve through nineteen sixty nine, American film actor. I think at least one time director, also a screenwriter. He wrote a number of screenplays as well.
He's pretty prolific, and I think he part he was credited. He has co credit on an Emmy for work on The Red Skeleton show writing comedy. So this guy very talented. He worked a lot in these categories, but he's best remembered today, perhaps secondarily for his role in this film, but mostly for his role as a deranged dope fiend in the nineteen thirty six film Tell Your Children, better known I think to everyone, as its re released title refer Madness.
We just a powerhouse performance. He's the one who is aggressively puffing the marijuana cigarette over and over as the lady is playing the piano. He's screaming at her to play faster, Play faster, Yes, And the narrator tells us that this is what happens to the reefer addict that he ends up with. Is they call him like inescapable madness or something.
A notorious film, a piece of anti marijuana propaganda that would later on to become like a cult classic because it is so ridiculously over the top and an ultimately very telling of this time period and it's sensibilities and objectives in his messaging. But it's a delirious performance, and it's interesting that it ultimately outshines a lot of his very successful and popular contemporary work, Like he was a
successful contemporary actor. But you know, we often end up remembering folks for the weird stuff.
Yeah, yeah, so yeah, as you said, in Devil Bat, he plays our sort of Jack Rabbit wise newspaper man. He's cool, he's quick witted, he's a touch devious, like he's got a little bit of a flim flam artist in him, but just enough that he's he's a bad boy, but still the good guy.
Yeah, it's weird that there's a whole subplot that goes on with him and his photographer attempting to fake a bad attack or fake a bat so they can get a photograph of it, so they don't have a they're a little low on journalistic integrity. But there's still our heroes. We're still totally rooting for them.
You know, we've talked on the show before about how so many sci fi and horror films from before roughly
the sixties have very boring male leads. I mean, some after the sixties do too, but especially like in the fifties, that's just the dead zone for protagonists in this Male protagonists in these genres the kind of low deaf rectangles who are there to just kind of look vaguely handsome and punch the villain, rescue the female lead, but don't really have any interesting dialogue or sharp angles to their personality. I found this guy refreshingly different. He's got a good
bit of personality. There are weird quirks about him, and some of his dialogue is kind of witty.
You know.
Who he actually reminded me of was the male lead in Doctor X from nineteen thirty two, that the pre code horror film with synthetic flesh. That character was also a wise cracking newspaper reporter.
That's good. I mean, I guess that ultimately like the news paper reporter, just in the long term as a fictional archetype, you know, kind of removed from the reality of actual journalism. It is often a space where we play with more rogue individuals. You know, they are in this gray space between like pure authority figures and and of course the criminal elemental forces of chaos and so forth, and so there is often a lot of room there for it to be wacky, weird, or even just completely
chaotic itself, you know. And it's like fear and loathing in Las Vegas, you know, getting into gonzo journalism and all. So even in this time period where there's a lot that's you know, getting more and more straight laced and buckled down, this is so much better than just your square jawed, you know, steak eating policeman type character you would get in various other pictures.
Yeah. And though I don't want to oversell the weirdness of this character, he's not super I mean, he's not Hunter Thompson, but he is kind of fox. He's kind of like, he's kind of wily and funny and not just there to be your you know, lawful, good slab of meat.
Yeah. And ultimately I thought it held his own in his big one on one scene with Bella at the end of the picture.
Yeah, I agreed, all right.
Supporting character in this is Yolanda Donlin, who plays the character Maxine, who is a French maid. She lived in nineteen twenty through twenty fourteen, American born British based actress who mostly worked in the UK. This is not the only film where she plays a French maid, but her career on the British stage seems to have been far more substantial. So she worked with the likes of Laurence Olivier and her last film was nineteen seventy six is Seven Nights in Japan.
She was a ray of sunshine here. I loved Maxine all right.
The main perfume boss is this guy, Henry Morton, and he is played by Guy Usher, who lived eighteen eighty three through nineteen forty four. Prolific character actor of the thirties and forties. His films include The Case of the Black Cat from thirty six, Buck Rogers thirty nine, and The Spanish Kate Mystery from nineteen thirty five. I thought he's pretty solid in this.
Yeah he is business man.
Yeah he has a kind of there's a very funny but at times a very awkwardly written scene with him in Bella Lagosi's character where bell We'll get to it, but what is it?
One of the many scenes where Bella is trying to convince somebody to put lotion on.
Yes, and also, like Belle Lagosi like eventually just out of pride, like all but admitting to the previous murders in the film, and Henry Morton is just kind of like, what was this guy talking about? And then finally Don's on him. Oh he killed all these people?
Yeah yeah, Oh wait next, are we going to get to the newspaper editor.
Yes, the character is Joe McGuinty. The actor is Arthur Q. Bran, who of eighteen ninety nine through nineteen fifty nine American actor and radio personality who he had many other credits, but he served as the voice of the Looney Tunes character Elmer Fudd from nineteen forty through nineteen fifty nine. Yeah, he was not the originator, and there were others who did that voice during this time, but he was an official Elmer Fudd, a voice actor.
That totally fits. I did not make that connection.
I mean, it's it's not it feels like the least shocking thing in the world when you see him in the film, because he looks like Elmer Fudd. It's like he has a very Elmer Fudd look. He's just not wearing the hunting cap.
But he's also so I mean, it's early in the existence of this cliche, so I guess he's one of the examples that is being copied in later films and TV shows. But he is the classic like police chief or newspaper editor who's barking at our rogue main character about how you're a loose cannon. He's mcgarnigle's boss on The Simpsons. He's like, well, mcgarnagle, you know Billy is dead.
Yeah, there are a lot of fun scenes with this character. All right, And I'm gonna mention the musical director here. This is you know, films of this nature from the time period. They're often using like stock music, and ultimately, I don't know, I couldn't tell. I didn't do deep enough research to find out exactly how much this guy worked on the music, how much of it is stock and so forth. But he was very prolific, so I'm
just going to mention him briefly. Anyway. It's David Schudnow, who lived nineteen oh nine through two thousand and two. Russian born composer and musical director who worked as music supervisor or musical director on one hundred and sixty four
credits between thirty eight and fifty six. His composer credits include nineteen forty two Is the Mad Monster and then later russ Meyer's nineteen sixty one film Erotica, and he went on to produce a number of projects in the sixties and seventies, mostly the films that were directed by his son Byron shudnow born nineteen twenty six, including a trilogy of G rated intelligent Doberman pictures. I've mentioned these
on the show before. They are The Doberman Gang seventy two, The Daring Doberman's from seventy three, and The Amazing Doberman's from seventy six. William Goldstein of Doctor Fib's fame was one of the writers on that last picture.
These are Doberman. You're not talking about people named Doberman. These are Doberman's the dog.
These are straight up dogs, I think, solving crimes and stuff. Again, not a horror movie or anything. It's like apparently G rated fun, but it was like a whole franchise that I feel like is largely forgot beautiful.
Well, I don't want to be mean, but I do not Nothing about the music in this movie really struck me. It was kind of forgettable.
It does everything expect a film from this time period to do, and nothing more. All Right, Well, shall we unleash the plot and an unsuspecting audience.
Yeah, let's open the window and let the bats out. Okay. So we begin with a text legend over like superimposed over a shot of just a town that By the way, did you have an idea of where this was supposed to take place? Because the opening shots made me think this is supposed to be in the American Southwest. Looks like the southwest. But then the reporter that goes to investigate is from the Chicago Register.
Yeah, who you know, they might just have a satellite office here, So I don't know. Everything feels very solid Middle America, you know.
Okay. Anyway, the text says, all Heathville loved Paul Carruthers. They're kindly village doctor. No one suspected that in his home laboratory on a hillside overlooking the magnificent estate of Martin Heath, the doctor found time to conduct certain private experiments. Weird, terrifying experiments. Period. Okay, So then we open on Bela
Lugosi hunched over a table covered in chemistry equipment. You got beakers, flasks, gas flames, in a room with fake stonework walls, and he's doing chemistry mixing solutions, decanting things into bottles, occasionally just having him a little free sample, like like sniffing, you know, getting a sniff yep.
Yep, doing some mad science. Basically, you know what he's up to. You didn't even need the crawl. Of course, Belle goes. He is up to weird, terrifying experiments. And you know, I don't know, we don't know. It's illegal, you know, God bless them. Go ahead do your weird terrifying stuff.
Why would he be sniffing the chemicals if there was anything wrong with them? So he goes into a secret passageway. This is accessed by way of a hidden switch in a bookcase, and this leads down into a dungeon, and the dungeon is full of bats. It's hard to tell exactly what's going on, So Rob, I'm gonna lay it out what I thought was going on, and you tell
me if it matches your impression. I think there are lots of bats, but for substantial portions of the movie, only one bat seems to be active at a time, So I believe these other bats are backup bats that are in storage waiting to be activated by the microwave. As you put it the thing that he's going to put this bat into in a minute.
That's right. You can only cook up one mutant bat at a time, but you've got to have a lot of normal bats on hand to cook up if something happens to that prime bat.
Okay, So the bats are dangling upside down from what looked like coat hangers. There is one main bat at the center of the room. It's bigger than all the others, and Legosi approaches it to say the first line of the film, what do you think the opening line of dialogue in this movie will be? He says, ah, my friend, our theory of glandular stimulation through electrical impulses was correct.
That's a hell of an opener. And then he goes on to say, a few days ago, you were as small as your companion, and now look at you, and I think he's got to be a good thirty percent bigger than the other bats. Now Here we cut to a close up shot of a real bat's face. We will see this exact same bat close up footage so many times in the movie. I don't know if it was something shot for the film or if they were
just getting you know, nature stock footage. But it's like right up in the bat's face, and it's some kind of bat like looking around, looking like it's struggling against restraints.
Yeah, I thought they did a pretty good job integrating their live animal shots and their prop shots here. Of course, as you might expect, this is often the case. The bat we see enclose up is clearly a fruit bat of some sort, yes, which is of course in real life, absolutely not interested in human flesh or anything like that. It wants to eat mangoes or something. But they to the untrained eye, they look more ferocious. They look kind
of like wolves, so that's what we get. But yeah, I thought the integration between the shots was pretty good though. The hangar bat kind of looks like some sort of like cured bat jerky, right.
Yes, it looks like a bat got caught into into a hydraulic press and so it's just a furry pancake with wings and then they left it out to dry in the sun.
Exactly. Yeah.
So Legosi dismounts the bat hangar and transports it to another room. This is a high voltage bombardment chamber behind a steel door with thick glass viewing windows. He leaves he like hangs the bat up in the room, leaves the room, puts on welding goggles, flips a switch. The electricity starts going nuts inside the room. It's like arcing from all these tesla coils and stuff, and the bat is just hanging there while Lugosi watches through the glass.
And I think the director must have thought that people would just really get a kick out of the glandular stimulation scene because it goes on for quite some time. It's like zap zap zaps app for a while. Then Lugosi goes inside the room to make some adjustments, then goes back outside and starts zapping it again, and we just get to watch.
Yeah, I mean, I guess it's worth pointing out that, like, what the full run time of this picture is sixty eight minutes, Yeah, so maybe we do have a certain amount of padding going on here.
Yeah. But as the electrical stimulation continues, the bat begins to flex its wings, so it's I guess it's coming to life, coming out of cold storage now. Once the stimulation is over, Legosi checks the bat for a heartbeat. He goes in with like a stethoscope and he's checking it out and he seems very very pleased with himself,
but he is interrupted by a phone call. It's a call from his bosses that they are the business partners Henry Morton and Martin Heath Heath of this heath Ville Heath, the Heath Company, and Henry Morton is his partner, and they are inviting doctor Carruthers to a family get together at the Heath residence that night, and then Carrothers says he appreciates the invitation quote, but I am very busy working on a formula for a new shaving lotion. And then Heath replies, oh, you know, but Doc, this is
my daughter's idea. And this is referring to Heath's adult daughter Mary. They say, you know, Henry Morton's son Don is going to propose to her tonight, and apparently she will be very upset if BELLEA Lugosi isn't there for that. So they hang up the phone and then Henry Morton says he's going to be surprised when he finds the special occasion is to present him with this bonus check. He says this while holding the check in his hand, and then Heath takes the check and stares at it
and says, almost wistfully, five thousand dollars. I don't know, maybe it's not coming across in the way I'm describing, But there are so many, like out loud references to this five thousand dollar check. It got very funny to me.
Yeah, five thousand snaggers. Yeah, this is a lot of money.
Well, whatever the amount is, it is just all these people gathered around being like, wow, this is the dollar amount of the check. Anyway, Before Carothers goes to the party, we see him explaining his giant bat scheme to the giant bat. He dips a cotton ball in the new shaving lotion he's making, and he holds it up to the glandular stimulated bat, the glandularly stimulated bat, and the bat starts screaming, and Legosi is like, good, Yes, I
taught you to hate this fragrance while you slept. Now if you smell it while you are awake, you will strike to kill.
All right, all right, murderous conditioning.
Okay, let me go to a scene of the party at Morton and Heath's house. So Mary is Heath's daughter, but they're also just a bunch of loose sons running around. I don't remember whose son is. Who is There's a bunch of them, and Morton is like, remember Roy, Tommy, you're not supposed to say anything about this five thousand dollars check that I hold in my hand until you get the signal from Heath. And then Mary Heath and
a Morton son named don Are. They're sort of cuddling and flirting on the other couch and Morton starts to give them the same talk, and they have all these ideas about how they should unveil the five thousand dollars check. But then they find out her others is not going to come to the party because he is busy with his lotion. So Roy, one of the Heaths sons, offers to take the check up to the laboratory and here you get our first like put on the lotion Roy scene.
So Roy goes up to the lab and Carruthers reacts with this strange, kind of hard to read cascade of emotions when he receives the five thousand dollars check. He'll explain why in a minute. But then he's like, okay, Roy Heath, I want you to try my new aftershave. And so Roy takes some of it and he smells it. He says, ooh, pretty strong, isn't it. This establishes a pattern. All the victims are going to say this like, wow,
smells really strong. But Legosi reassures him. He says, no, no, the scent evaporates a short time after you use it. So Roy takes a few drops in his hand, and then the Legosi gleefully explains. He says, now, rub it on the tender part of your neck.
Here.
I love these scenes. So he keeps like touching his throat and being like, here's where you rub it. It's so soft on the skin.
Yes, says you want to apply lots of it to the esophagus and the jugular.
Yeah, that's right. So Roy rubs the lotion on his throat, then he departs. When he leaves, he says good night, doctor, and Legosi replies, goodbye, Roy. He will also do this in every one of the murders.
Yes.
Then we get a weird voiceover of Legosi's thoughts. Is this the only time in the entire movie when we hear a character's thoughts out loud? I think, so it is.
Yeah, this really feels like one of those classic moments of the director or someone in the production saying, I don't think we got this across. Let's have some voice over here, And that's what they do.
Absolutely feels tacked on, but what So he's standing there staring at the check and we hear Legosi's voiceover say, lovely check, isn't it? Doctor? They are wealthy because of you. You made them rich. Doctor. It was your formula. Tonight. They gave you five thousand dollars and wanted you to come down to their house and thank them for it. That was your money. They gave you, like a bone tossed to a faithful dog. And we get some very
good facial expressions from Bella here. First he looks sad, and then it turns into a grimace, and then it turns into maniacal laughter and then straight into a furious glower. He is ready now to send the bats, so he goes down into the secret passageway. He goes to his mutant bat and he says, tonight, you have work to do, and the bat flies out.
Yep, yep. And I think the bat flying looks pretty good. Though. There's going to be a plot element that kind of tarnishes the effect a bit later on.
Yeah. Yeah, So first we see Don and Mary out in the garden on a bench. Remember they were the ones who were going to get engaged. This part I found incredibly perplexing. Don says, you know, while our families are here, tonight is a good time to announce our engagement, and Mary says to him, looke, Don, I love you, I've loved you since we were kids, but not in that way. You're more like a brother to me. And I was like, what, how did you get to the point of thinking they were gonna be engaged?
Yeah? Yeah, he seemed exceedingly sure of this. Yeah so this was yeah, this is a real head scratcher.
But he takes it well. He doesn't get mad or anything. He's just like, oh, okay, fair enough.
Yeah, it's like we needed more information. Why was this miscommunication in place where they betrothed? What was going on here? The idea?
Okay? But yeah, Don takes it well, He's like okay. Then meanwhile, nearby Mary's brother, Roy, the guy who put the lotion on his throat, he arrives home, gets out of his car and is immediately dive bombed by a bat and we don't see a lot of it. I mean, we see the bat flying, and we see sort of a dark dive bomb thing, but it's not like we get like a clear close up.
Eventually, we'll probably watch Life Force for Weird House Cinema and we'll have to compare the dive bombing bat sequences. I think they have some of these in Fright Night as well, right in there, dive bombing bat scene in that that sounds right. Yeah.
Oh, and so you know, the hear Hi's and marian Don come running and they find Roy in the driveway there and they're like, call doctor Carruthers. Good. So you know, Carrothers comes to check on him and they have both families gathered around him as he's lying there in the driveway, and there's a dialogue exchange that goes like this. Carrothers says, there's nothing I can do, and Heath says, you mean he's dead. Car Others says, yes, I'd better call the coroner.
Heath says, you think it's murder? Carro other says, I don't know. I never saw anything like it. Before the jugular vein is severed, they all look down. It cuts to black, and this is where the news media comes into play. Yeah, but because everybody trusts Carruthers, I mean, of course we should have.
Yeah, they tell us this a lot. They're always like, everybody trusts corrects, everyone loves Corunthers, the community loves him. We're given very little in addition to that to make us believe this is the case, because come on, it's bell Legosi. Uh, Like he brings that aura here. We don't really see him doing like nice things for the community. He just wants to do terrifying experiments in his laboratory.
Yeah, he's acting incredibly suspicious from the first scene.
Yeah, but all right, fair enough, nobody suspects him. All right.
So it's time to meet some new characters at the offices of a newspaper, the Chicago Register. So it shows a busy, bustling newsroom. We're two guys on the floor of the newsroom throwing punches. Looked like it, but then it cuts away quick.
Yeah it's you know, it's a scrappy environment. They're having fun, they're working hard, they're playing hard.
And so we're going to meet a couple of characters here. The assignment editor McGinty who Again, he's your classic large cigar chewing police chief slash newspaper editors. He's telling the cop or reporter, you're a loose cannon. You're off the force. Here's your new partner. And in fact, we get all three of those in this movie.
Yes, yes, I do like the elements too, though with our newspaper editor here, who is like we got to remember the Heath company. It's a big account, you know, big advertising accounts for the paper. So they do interject a little bit of like realistic news room politics.
Here, well kind of, but I didn't understand the dynamics. So yeah, I thought that was interesting. They're like, Heath is a big advertising account, so you've got to go to Heathville. You've got to get a photo a photographer to go with you, go to Heathville and do a big sensational news story about his son's unsolved mutant bat murder.
Yeah. Yeah, I mean that part makes less sense. It would be it would be more realistic where it's like, Okay, you're going you're going up there, but make sure you play it really respectful. We've got to cover this. But they're a huge advertiser. So again, some things are maybe lost in the message here.
I mean normally, if there's like a big industry mogul who has a child with an their adult child is killed in an unsolved murder, you want the National Inquirer up there getting into it.
Yeah, well they send the a team, as we'll see.
That's right. So our hero here is Johnny Layden. He's a scrappy reporter who's always causing trouble. Somebody's always calling the to get him fired, but you know what, he gets results. And McGinty explains, there's this mystery killing in Heathville. It's old Martin Heath's son. He wants Layden looking into it. Leyton is unfamiliar. He's like, who's Martin Heath? And McGinty this was also weird. McGuinty's like, who's Martin Heath?
Say?
Have you ever had a date with a girl? And Leyden says, you know, he might have had one at some point and McGinty says, well did she smell sweet? If so, that's because of Martin Heath Cosmetics Limited. They make all that goo that women put on their faces. So is the premise here that Heath is the only perfume and cosmetics company in the world and invented and has exclusive rights to the concept of makeup and perfume.
I don't know.
I guess they're just a major player anyway. So Layton goes to Heathville. He takes along with him a photographer. As he was told to. This character has a great name. It's one Shot McGuire. One shot McGuire is a bow tie guy who keeps his suit jacket buttoned. He has a kind of he's a little bit more nerdy than Layton, but also has he's kind of got a nerdy but rascally temperament to match Layton's.
Yeah, and I don't know from the title, I'm not sure is he if he's supposed to be a really good photographer or just a really sloppy photographer, Like, oh, did you get pictures of the sporting event? I got one shot? Does that mean you only needed one like perfect shot, first take? Or you just really don't care? He just like good enough.
I didn't know. Yeah, So if it's a writer and they call you like first draft maguire, what does that mean that.
Good yeah, nailed it first draft? Well, I guess sometimes it works like that, but one has right to be suspicious.
So our two reporters go to Heathville. They meet the police chief there and they begin the inquest, and the police chief admits that they have not gotten very far with the investigation, but that Roy Heath suffered the strangest wounds. He had shallow slashes in his throat, too deep for
fingernails and not deep enough to be a knife. And then the coroner says that they could have been the talons of a bird, a bird, but the sheriff says they know that it wasn't a bird because they found several hairs on the shoulder of Heath's coat, so it couldn't have been a bird.
Soide note that there's gonna be a lot of dialogue in this film related to the idea that people think bats are birds, yes, and need to be corrected on the matter.
Multiple characters have to correct I think doctor Carruthers and Layton are frequently correcting people on calling bats birds.
Yeah, nobody knows exactly what a bat is, but.
They say that the hairs on the coat they're not human. Lab tests showed that they came from a mouse, and Layton says, say a bat has hair like a mouse. What if it was a bat? And I don't know, I call bs. I think that is too extreme of a bull's eye connection there, unless Layton has like undisclosed psychic powers or something. Another clue though, They say there was a peculiar odor about the wounds, but the police were unable to identify it, and now it has been
destroyed by evaporation. So we're going to go on to the meeting with Mary that the reporters are continuing the investigation the share there. The police chief is just like, oh yeah, sure, look into it. You know, you'll get no objection from me, which is kind of unusual for these films. I feel like it's always a territorial squabble about who gets to investigate. So the newspaperman go to
the Heath residence. Of course, it's immediately clear that Leyden and Mary are going to fall in love, and then there's a secondary romance as well, because Mary's got the French maid, the gorgeous French maid named Maxine, who's running around saying we metemoiselle and apparently she is just wild for photo journal East and from their very first introduction, one shot maguire is saying, yes, I will marry this French maid. And now they've got competing theories about the murder.
They ask, you know, did this guy have any enemies? Not really? Was it an animal attack? Carruthers says, yeah, it was a wild animal who attacked him, but Leyden says, I don't think so. And this sort of leads into this middle section of the movie that's more just sort of investigating the murders and more murders taking place. So there is a murder of another one of the Suns.
This time it's a guy named Tommy. Legosi gives him the lotion to try, and Tommy puts it on and he's like, ooh, that feels great, very very soothing, and Legosi says, I don't think you will ever use anything else. So he's, you know, walking around with the lotion on, and he gets attacked by a bat in the garden patio. Now at this bad attack, the journalists witness it, they see it happen, and so they try to report on it. They call it McGinty. They're like, yeah, he was attacked
by a devil bat. McGuinty doesn't believe them at first, but then he does run with their story and the headline is mysterious Devil Bat kills Thomas Heath. I do like this movie shows us lots of newspaper headlines.
Yeah. My one disappointment was I couldn't make any of the lower headlines out. You know, that's always there's always a lot of fun there, especially in like parodies on the Simpson like what the stories that didn't make the very top because of whatever supernatural shenanigans are going on.
I feel like multiple times we see a newspaper and there's another article with the headline praise from cheerleaders.
Hmm okay, otherwise a slow news day.
Oh and then they show a second paper that says who will be the Devil Bat's next victim? Villagers cringe and terror of murderer. Oh and another one of the articles it has the headline pericles the great.
What Yeah, local theater.
Maybe I don't know Laura mipsum. So anyway, there's this whole middle section where they've seen the Devil Bat. But McGinty's like, hey, I need a photo. We got to run a photo. So they stage a hoax photo using a stuffed bat from a taxidermy shop.
Yes, I loved and hated this because it's just such a weird, wacky element that suddenly, like journalists contact, he's out the window and they're gonna fake this shot. But then it does feel, from a filmmaking standpoint like kind of an error because, let's face it, these bat effects, I think they're pretty great considering the budget and the time period. But when you also introduce a fake, fake bat into the scenario, that fake bat looks too much like the actual bat, Yes, and it makes me second
guess the effects on some level. So I didn't like that.
Same thought the hoax bat looks the same as the real devil bat.
Yeah, it's like if somebody wears a monster mask in a movie that also features a monster, that monster mask can't look too good and your actual monster effects better be like a cut above.
Yes, yeah, yeah so this. Oh, but also this movie has a debunking scene. So the hoax photo is debunked by a skeptical scientist on a national radio program, and it shows just like everybody in the country sitting around listening to this radio program. They introduce a scientist named Professor Percival Garland rains whom the announcer calls the world's greatest authority on animals and rains says that devil bats may have existed in the dark ages when people lived
in caves, but not anymore. And he has proof that the photo is a fake. He analyzed it under a magnifying glass, and he says the bat has a tag on it which says made in Japan. But I was thinking, wait a minute, what if the real devil bat is simply a manufactured object, you know, created by magic.
How did they get a fake bats manufactured? Yeah, either across the ocean or like, are they selling these at the local store? Did just so many questions arise from this.
I would have thought that taxidermy bats would be a more locally produced article. Yeah, oh hey, folks were back. We had to just take a break in the middle of our recording session. But but now we are in real time a few hours later, continuing our discussion of the devil bat. So where did we leave off it was where? Oh, they just pulled off the hoax and they got caught. They got caught by the radio guy.
Yeah, yeah, they attempted to do the fake photo. And is it now or in just a little bit where like basically it's like, I gotta fire you guys, this is awful, and they're like, you can't fire us because we're onto this great case. We're going to keep working it.
That's right. So McGinty. They're on the phone with McGuinty, the chief the editor, and he fires Leyton and one shot McGuire though I guess they did conspire, so fair enough. Yeah, and obviously this is not the first time he has fired them. They even say so. They're like, you'll hire us back. You always do. But the real downside they
don't seem all that upset about getting fired. The real downside is there now on the outs with their new lady friends, Mary and Maxine are not happy with them for doing a hoax, especially since this hoax involves the creature that allegedly killed their brothers and family friends and so forth and almost fiance.
Yeah, it seems like a massive misstep, especially on that angle.
But Layton's a real go getter. He doesn't let this put him to bed. He keeps investigating and he finds out about the history of Corruthers and the Heath Company. He finds out the Coruthers missed out on getting part of the Heath Company fortune by just being being paid in cash instead. And there's some notes somewhere in here about like a chemist examines the Legosi lotion and finds out that it has a previously unknown element in it that could not be identified. I love this detail. It
seems a bit much. But Bella explains that the otherwise unknown element was something he found in Tibet, which the Lamas use in their ceremonies.
Okay, all right, okay, I don't know what those ceremonies could be if it gets bats riled up in the scenario, but okay, fair enough.
Anyway, so En goes to confront Legosi with questions about all this stuff that they take him some of the aftershape to analyze, I believe, and Legosi is like, oh, you know, to the chief of police and to Leyden, why didn't you both each take a bottle of this stuff home with you and use it.
Now?
The chief of police he's having none of it. He says, if my wife ever smelled perfume on me, she'd suspect me. Sure, so he won't take it. But Leyton he's like, yeah, sure, I'll take some and of course he gets attacked later that night while he is sitting out in the garden with one shot. But this actually works out to their benefit because Leyden pulls a revolver out of his coat pocket, shoots the devil bat, kills the devil bat. So the
devil Bat wasn't I don't know all that threatening. In the end, they get destroyed by rather mundane means, and then it's the biggest story on all the newspapers. The headline is reporter kills devil bat, subhead shoots monster.
Well, I wondered, did he write this story for the paper? That seems like it would be a massive misstep as well, But I don't think he would. He would probably fight for it. He's like, look, I killed the devil Bat, I should get to write the article. Yes, I can maintain my journalistic integrity. Yes, I did just try and fake a bat photo.
Do you see the article underneath shoots monster is called Americanism.
I was trying to figure out or if the Americanism is part of the monster shooting or is this a separate like article. There's a subsection somebody's like Weekly Callum on Americanism in.
A classic display of americanism. The reporter has shot the devil bat. But you know now that they've actually got a real dead devil bat corpse in hand, and not just a taxidermid object, they can prove they were right all along. So everybody has to eat crow. There's another radio program with the remember the skeptic professor rains. He comes back. He's like, look, I was wrong. The devil bat does exist and it is the last of its kind, a giant bat from the Neolithic age, which he explains
is another word for the Stone Age. Thank you, professor.
Of course, we know this is not true. We know that this bat is not an ancient creature. It is newly cooked up in Lagosi's microwave.
But how but he's the foremost authority on animals.
Well yeah, I mean maybe he recognizes the process that's going on, but he doesn't understand the technology involved.
Shows how much you know, professor, Get out of your ivory tower. You don't even know about Bella Legosi's bat microwave. So Bella has to cook up another bat from the freezer, which he does. He gets it out and he cooks it with the electricity, and then he goes and checks the bat with the stethoscope and he's smiling. He says, splendid, you will be even greater than your unfortunate predecessor, and then the bat screams in stock footage and he's like enraged,
aren't you fine? I'm enraged also tonight I shall call on Henry Morton and you shall strike him down. So we get another scene, another one of these classic scenes of Bella convincing somebody to put the lotion on their skin. He goes to the offices of Heath Cosmetics where he's showing everything to Morton, the big boss, and he's like, you know, my lotion's so good, try it out, and Morton says, no, I'll try it tomorrow after I shave,
you know, because it's after shave. He says, quote, then my skin will be more tender and receptive to the lotion. And Legosi is like, yeah, why not try it now? See you can put it right over the jugular vein where the skin is always tender and receptive to a lotion. Once again comments about isn't it too strong? He's like, no, no, no, it'll evaporate quickly. So he sort of bullies Morton into
putting the lotion on his throat. Then Morton starts gloating about how all of the doctor's formulas have been highly successful and it was quite foolish of him to take cash for his work instead of a cut of the profits. Otherwise he would be he would be a rich man. Now, So you're not feeling that bad for Morton's just being a jerk.
Here, Yeah, yeah, he is, he absolutely So he does seem a bit oblivious too, Like, so he's not I don't know, it's a weird mix of him being kind of like accidentally jerky and still a bit maliciously jerky.
Yeah, yeah, you're right. He's like, huh, isn't it funny? You're the one that did the work, but I got rich and that that's funny, isn't it.
Yeah, And then he continues here as Legosi keeps making even more like cutting and suggestive comments that imply that he has been murdering people with bats.
Yeah, that's right. So he's like, you know, you've had a lot of fun in your laboratory with your experiments, dreaming up something new. You're a dreamer, doc. Money's bad for dreamers, and Legosi is just dissecting Morton's brain with his eyes, and Legosi tells more tells Morton that his feeble intellect cannot begin to comprehend the magnitude of his scientific discoveries. Morton's like, what discovery are you talking about? And he says, when you find out, Henry, it will
be too late for you anyway, good night. Oh and also before he leaves, he mentioned something about having already proved his discovery three times. There have been three murders.
Yeah, and this still doesn't instantly sink in for Morton.
It takes a minute.
It takes a minute.
Morton starts thinking about that and he's like, huh. So he puts in a phone call to Martin Heath and he's like, I think I've got a clue to solve the murders. He says, if half of what I suspect is true, it's the most diabolical plot then a madman ever concocted. So they're both out driving on a dark road and Legosi leaves first, and he's also going to Martin Heath's house. But Legosi gets there before Morton and
he parks. He opens the trunk of his car and a bat just screams and flies out of the trunk, and so of course right after this, Morton arrives. But the bat it gets him. It devil bats him. Now, in this case, a bunch of the guys in the house like they don't I think they don't see the bat, but they see Morton like he's banging on the door, screaming for help, and they go and open the door and he just like collapses into the foyer dead, and
you know, they're like, oh, whoop's another one. So we see a newspaper headline again, call and it's Devil Bat's mate kills Henry Morton. Yeah, don't how do they know it's his mate?
Yeah? I feel like that that headline the editor was playing it up a little bit like, let's get a love angle in.
Here between the bats, bride of devil Bat.
Yeah, that was probably one of the candidates.
Oh and while it's showing us all the headlines this time this has happened before, it's like superimposing the shots of the newspaper with that footage of close up footage of a bat face. So who's the next victim going to be? Well, we see a silhouette of Bella Lagosi wearing a hat in the dark room with the bottle of his formula and he's surreptitiously adding it to something.
What could it be? Well, after the scene, we get a scene where Leyton Leyton is addressing Martin Heath, Mary Legosi and one Shot maguire and he explains he's very glad that mister Heath invited him to come live in their home until Devil Bat two is defeated, because he's worried about Mary, right, you know, he thinks she may be targeted next. It's logical, but Heath hasn't quite caught on yet. He's like, why would you think that? And Leydon explains, well, the other victims were members of the
Morton and Heath families. Therefore, he concludes that someone is using the bat to wipe out these two families. Legosi, of course, claims this is preposterous. He says the thought of a human controlling a bat is fantastical, and as a counterexample, he points out that even one Shot McGuire was attacked by a bat, and he's not a Heather
or a Morton, so that's a good point. But one Shot McGuire argues, now wait a second, I'm basically a member of this family because I am definitely going to get married to the French maid.
Oh well, yeah, that works out.
So they all say they're good nights, and then Legosi once again does it instance you know, Mary says good night to him and he says good by Mary. So later we see Mary getting ready for bed. She wonders if Maxine has filled her perfume bottles with something new, because there is a strong, smelling new fragrance in them. Maxine denies it, and Mary concludes that it must have been her father, who apparently secretly switcheroose her perfume every
time his factory produces a new one. That's a bold move. Also, she's putting on perfume to go to bed.
I mean, I don't need Maybe she skipped a shower, I don't I don't really know what the rules here, and maybe that was the thing in the forties or maybe people do that.
I don't know what people do with perfume. Do people put on perfume to go to bed?
Maybe they do? After this nitty though, you'll never put on perfume before you go to bed again.
Yeah, So anyway, so Mary goes to bed and we see the bat fly out and what's going to happen. Of course, you know it's going to come to her room, but it actually doesn't get in. It like zooms through the night, screeching until it reaches Mary's window and then it's just there banging against the window and she wakes up alarms. All the dudes come running and Mary survives the night. But the next morning there's an investigation what
could have happened, and they discover the perfume switch. So Leyden, he's finally putting all the pieces together here. He thinks he's figured out the case, and he comes up with a plan. He's like, Okay, we're gonna lie to Carrothers and make him think that Mary was injured or perhaps driven insane by the bat, and then we're going to trick him into coming over to the house and then stall him here for time. Meanwhile, Leyden's gonna run around and do what he calls a little private bat hunting.
What this really means is he's going up to Carruther's lab to snoop around. He does that and he finds the secret passageway and goes into the bat dungeon.
All right, So now all is becoming revealed.
But the others don't do a great job at their part of this plan. So like they're trying to stall Corrothers at the house and he's trying to leave if he needs to get back to his lab, and one shot Maguire like, I don't feel so good. You ought to see my tongue. It looks like a squirrel's tail. But Carrothers just advises him to take a mercury compound.
And so Carrothers goes back to the lab. There's some cat and mouse there with Leyden sneaking around while Carrothers is, you know, doing things, and Leyden witnesses carr others talking to his bats. So there's there's no going back now he knows what's up. I think he's going to let them out for the night, because if you interpreted this the same way, Rob, I think he thinks the jig is up and he doesn't want the bats around if somebody comes snooping.
Mm hmm, yeah, let him go like flush the bats down the toe.
Yeah, exactly. And so Leyden sneaks around around the house, knocks on the front door and he asks for some of the shaving lotion. He says he thinks that if he douses himself in it, it might attract the killer Legosi plays dumb, but you know, gives him the bottle anyway, and Leyden dabs some around his throat and he really gets it up in there, and he's plains his plan is to go sit in the garden and quote, when the killer bat does one of its power dives, I'll
blast it, which is what he did last time. So I guess he's planning to do this again. Maybe he's hoping there are only two bats total. And so Carrothers agrees to come along and watch this experiment. So they have a little tense conversation in the garden at night. They're a little apprehensive, or at least Corrothers is. They trade some comments with heavy implication that maybe they understand
one another's motives. And then suddenly, at one point in the conversation, Leyden just like tosses a bunch of the shaving lotion on her Others and then reveals that he knows the whole plot. And so at first Carothers seems weirdly kind of gloomy. He just kind of accepts his fate, but then tries to make a break for it, Like he tries to grab and wrestle the gun from Leyden, but the devil Bat appears and everybody scatters.
Right right, And you know what's going to happen next. What is the comeuppance of any mad scientist that creates monsters?
Oh, of course, foiled by his own monster. Yeah, not foil, so carruthers. Well, first he tries to trick Mary into coming back to his lab, but he doesn't make it gets he gets devil Bat dive bombed in the garden on the way there, and so then Leyden comes and has to explain to Mary. I laughed out loud at this part where he's like, the devil Bat belonged to him, Mary, he committed those murders. And then Mary just lays her head on Leyden's shoulder, and then it's the end title, the end.
Yeah, they're like, check on the doctor, and they're like, I don't think the doc made. Yeah.
I love the abruptness with which these older movies end. It's just the bad guy dies, the leading lady like kisses or lays her head on the shoulder of the leading man, and then you get title card the end, all within twenty seconds.
Yeah, I mean it's been over an hour. People need to get home from the theater and or they need to watch the next movie that's playing immediately after this one. But I think All Things Considered is a pretty good final showdown, like with the back and forth between the hero and the villain. You know, sometimes they're even more by the books than this. Just we definitely watched some of those and talked about them on Weird House Cinema where it's like Bady gets makes a break for it
and is shot by the police. Monster is shot by the police, Monster is killed by.
The military.
Military arrives, Clint Eastwood is in a jet play.
Yeah, exactly. Tarantula.
Yeah, so this one, this one is a little more thought out than that and a little less by the numbers. But then it does have that classic abrupt thirties and forties ending, which yeah, I mean, it cleans it up nicely. It's just like Bam, that's it.
Nothing could destroy the monster except the power of explosives.
And it's just so ridiculous that, granted years later, someone would say I got an idea for a sequel to this picture. What if he didn't do those murders. The whole movie was about him doing the murders. It's not in question.
I've almost got to watch that now. Oh, I don't know.
Maybe it's fun. I don't know. I haven't seen it. But it doesn't have legosy. Oh.
It's called Devil Bat's Daughter.
That's what it is, which is weird because she's not the daughter of the Devil Bat. She's Carrother's daughter.
But you know, yeah, the poster makes it look like a Western.
Yeah, I don't know. It's supposedly yeah, less of a horror film. And it has Miss America from nineteen forty one in it. So oh, it's got that going for it. Okay, all right, So there you have it. Devil Bat, the Devil Bat, sorry except no substitutes. Yeah, this is a it's a surprisingly fun watchable flick. Moved right along, had some fun performances in it.
I feel like we really shouldn't stop here. We should just keep going with Killer Bat movies and find them, rank them, discuss what they have in common, the themes they address. To what extent was Devil Bat really about the bats? And to what extent. Was it really about pride and lotion?
Yeah? I think it essentially is about pride and lotion, much like Breaking Bad. His Breaking Bad is not really about the math, it's about other things. But undeniably a giant bat movie. So yeah, I'd be interesting to look and see what all we have to consider in terms of other giant bad films, aside from the ones we already mentioned, like Life Force and possibly Friday Night. Oh what do you know?
The British Film Institute website has a list of ten great bat films.
Oh, excellent, just straight up bat films, not like bad human hybrids, because that's the kind of another subgenre which I can think of at least one really good example there.
But oh, one of the examples is Abominable Doctor Fibes because remember one of the guys gets attacked by bats.
Oh that's right. Yeah, I mean, if you have vampires in your film, there's a very good chance you're can have bats. There's a good chance is going to turn into a bat or bats, And yeah, I'm here for it.
All right. I think that does it for this one.
All right, we'll gohe and close it out. But just a reminder that stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast. Asked core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema. If you want to see a list of all the episodes we've done over the years, look us up on the letterbox dot com. That's L E T T E R B O x D dot com. Our profile is weird House and we got a list right there.
You can look at it, look at all the fun you know, box arts and poster arts. You can arrange things by decade and see what we've gotten into what we haven't gotten into. Write in with your suggestions because we always want to hear what kind of films you'd like us to talk about, and we also want your feedback on the films that we've discussed. If you have a history with the Devil bat If, so let us know about it.
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