5.7 | / 10 |
Users | 0.5 | |
Reviewer | 2.5 | |
Overall | 2.5 |
Dr. 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...
Starring: Bela Lugosi, Suzanne Kaaren, Dave O'Brien (I), Guy Usher, Yolande DonlanHorror | 100% |
Sci-Fi | Insignificant |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 1.32:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.37:1
English: LPCM Mono
None
25GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region A (B, C untested)
Movie | 2.5 | |
Video | 3.5 | |
Audio | 3.5 | |
Extras | 2.0 | |
Overall | 2.5 |
Poor, undervalued Bela Lugosi. His career is one of Hollywood's great tragedies. After a name-making turn in 1931's Dracula—in which he played the count with a cruel, hypnotizing seductiveness—Lugosi found himself increasingly typecast, second-billed to costars like Boris Karloff, and unable to convince producers that he was fit for non-horror roles. By the late 1930s, when he became stricken with chronic sciatica that left him addicted to methadone, he was largely confined to low-budget Poverty Row features, eking out a living taking increasingly demeaning and routine parts as mad scientists and monsters, Svengalis and psychopaths. One of the most middling of these is 1941's The Devil Bat, a hokey horror-comedy from Producers Releasing Corporation, a low-rent studio even by Poverty Row standards. Clocking it at a slim 68 minutes, the film screams "cheap" and feels like it was created specifically as the B-side filler for a bad double feature. Were it not for Lugosi's magnetic presence, it's doubtful The Devil Bat would still be watched today, and even with Lugosi the movie drags, padded with repetitive plot elements. That's not to say there isn't any delicious B-movie cheese here—there certainly is—but the film doesn't quite have enough of it to make for a so-bad-it's-good scenario.
As a film in the public domain, The Devil Bat has long been subjected to home video releases of less-than-stellar quality, but Kino-Lorber aims to give us a presentation that—while not perfect—aims to be more definitive. The 1080p/AVC-encoded transfer here, like a lot of Kino releases, is essentially offered up as-is, with no significant digital cleanup or restoration beyond some contrast balancing. (And the blacks and whites are fairly stable, barring some occasional brightness fluctuations.) The print is littered with age-related artifacts—white specks, scratches, brief jitters—and while these could feasibly be removed with enough time, money, and effort, their presence certainly isn't detrimental to the viewing of the movie. Simply scanning the film in high definition, making the tonality consistent, and foregoing any unnecessary filtering—DNR, edge enhancement—is enough to make this edition stand out above all previous versions. While the image is never particularly sharp, there's a clear improvement from standard definition editions, with finer detail visible in the actors' faces, clothing, and the film grain itself.
Kino-Lorber has given the film an uncompressed Linear PCM 2.0 mono track that's as good as can be expected, considering this is a seventy-two year old Poverty Row production that's been badly mistreated through the years. Yes, there are some of the usual age-related quirks—some light hissing, occasional pops and crackles, some brashness in the high end—but nothing that mars the experience. Dialogue is always easily understood, which is good since there are no subtitle options, and the spooky score—with its sudden violin stabs—is projected well. No issues here outside the normal early-talkies wear 'n' tear.
Despite a ludicrously fun-sounding premise—a mad scientist creates a killer bat that tracks its victims by the scent of their aftershave—The Devil Bat is one of Bela Lugosi's less memorable Poverty Row outings. It's a rather routine low-budget early 1940s horror movie, and even Lugosi's smiling-but-dark-hearted presence can't keep the film from feeling dull. And while it has its moments of retrospectively enjoyable badness—like the truly awful special effects—there are too few of them to push The Devil Bat into the "so-bad-it's-good" category. This one's strictly for diehard Bela Lugosi fans, but if you fall into that camp, you'll be pleased with Kino-Lorber's new Blu-ray release, which features a decent new high definition transfer, uncompressed audio, and a dry-but-insightful commentary from horror historian Richard Harland Smith.
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