Save your money for something good and enjoyable

It's no definitive masterpiece but it's damn close.

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

This movie was so-so. It had it's moments, but wasn't the greatest.

In The Devil Bat, Bela Lugosi plays a kindly old doctor who's conducting some nasty experiments, raising huge bats and turning them into killers with a scent.Turns out old Doc Lugosi was done out of millions by a pair of partners who made their fortune with the profits from his experiments. But he's going to get them because he's developed a special aftershave which if you put it on might not help you with the ladies, but those bats will tear you to pieces because the stuff drives them wild. Of course there's also a perfume developed for the women.Reporter Dave O'Brien who was also busy doing B westerns for PRC took time off to be the hero in this cheesy epic. He cracks the case and wins the girl who now is the only heir to the company. That worked out nice for O'Brien.Poor Bela, he had a knack for picking these things. This one's a couple of steps from Ed Wood.

Low budget B picture with career-faltering Bela Lugosi directed by Jean Yarboro who directed Abbott & Costello movies.Lugosi's workshop has not one, not two, bit THREE secret rooms! What's up with that? By the time this film was made, he was already looking like a mess from his drug habit. But he's able to pull it together for most scenes. The music in this movie is canned and really over the top that sort of adds to the kitchi-ness of the movie. Particularly when the absolutely gigantic bats are in the screen. You've never seen anything so big!The guy from Reefer Madness is in this too. Guess he got around.Is the movie good? No way. But if you are in for a wacky film late at night, this could be your bag.The PlotDr. Carruthers feels bitter at being betrayed by his employers, Heath and Morton, when they became rich as a result of a product he devised. He gains revenge by electrically enlarging bats and sending them out to kill his employers' family members by instilling in the bats a hatred for a particular perfume he has discovered, which he gets his victims to apply before going outdoors. Johnny Layton, a reporter, finally figures out Carruthers is the killer and, after putting the perfume on himself, douses it on Carruthers in the hopes it will get him to give himself away. One of the two is attacked as the giant bat makes one of its screaming, swooping power dives.

Bela Lugosi is one of my favorite actors of all time. His voice is slow and dense with an accent that gives all his characters many more layers of texture than just what meets the eyes. The Devil Bat has a great plot almost reminiscent of a cult film. I love the small absurdities like when Lugosi gives his lotion to his friend for him to try, he tells him to put it on his neck and Lugosi gives this creepy smile and laugh and delivers his lines so well I find myself laughing. The story is really well written as well and the plot is consistent throughout. The lesson behind the story is well enforced through the terrifying murders of the people who have taken advantage of a mad scientist.

Imbecile, Bombastic, Ignoramus.The Devil Bat is directed by Jean Yarbrough and written by George Bricker and John T. Neville. It stars Bela Lugosi, Suzanne Kaaren, Dave O'Brien, Donald Kerr and Gary Usher. Straight out of Poverty Row is this PRC production that's as bonkers as it is fun. Plot sees Lugosi as a fed up cosmetic chemist who decides that the company he provides his inventions for have not done right by him financially. So in his secret laboratory at home he breeds big killer bats, bats that he rears to kill anyone wearing the scent of aftershave lotion that he has handed out to the targets of his ire. As the bodies begin to mount up and the press whip up a devil bat on the loose storm, journalists Henry Layden (O'Brien) and "One Shot McGuire" close in on the source of the town's terror.The low budget is often evident, be it props and sets that shouldn't move etc, but at just over an hour in length this gets in and does its job with a sort of carefree abandon that is to be admired. Lugosi is having fun shifting from borderline mania to crafty dastard with a sense of humour, and of course there are big scary bats that shriek before homing in for the girl. Result! The flaws are obvious throughout, not least that Lugosi ends up playing second fiddle to the journalists' blend of bravado and buffoonery, but as time fillers go, and as Lugosi's Poverty Row Horrors go, this is impossible to dislike and not have a good time with. 6/10