Friday, October 09, 2015

The Devil Bat


 (1940)**

Bela Lugosi plays a mad scientist who invents a perfume agent that causes his trained bats to become murderous. He then passes out the perfume or men's aftershave to anyone who pisses him off. A bumbling reporter and his photographer buddy who is unable to get a photo of the devil bat decides to string up a stuffed bat he got at a taxidermy shop and fake the photo for the article. The photo runs in the paper but when a "made in Japan" tag is spotted the legendary devil bat is thought to be a hoax and becomes a huge joke. The reporter & his mate are then fired and spend the rest of the film trying to get real photos to redeem themselves.

First of all, the "real" devil bat looks no better than the stuffed one, in fact it's probably one and the same. It's very hard to take this film seriously when the supposed threat looks like this:


and the reactions to this stiff winged mammoth are as such:


Worst of all, they splice in actual real bat footage of the bat's face to, I'm guessing, strike terror into the audience but they chose one of these adorable big eyed bats for the head shots and the cuteness factor just blows any chance of it being terrifying. I do love Bela and he is solid throughout but I'm not buying this whole devil bat thing for a minute.

5 comments:

JPX said...

Funny review and pictures! You managed to take a sad song and make it better.

DKC said...

Great review. JPX, I'm dying over your comment!!

Abduscias said...

Aww :) How cute!!

Octopunk said...

"First of all, the 'real' devil bat looks no better than the stuffed one, in fact it's probably one and the same."

Oh my god that made me laugh. Awesome.

AC said...

Sounds like another SBIG, bad but in an enjoyable way.

Malevolent

 2018  ***1/2 It's 1986 for some reason, and a team of paranormal investigators are making a big name for themselves all over Scotland. ...