By the end
of 1932, Lionel Atwill had already co-starred with Fay Wray in both Doctor X and Mystery of the Wax Museum. While Warner Bros was in post-production
on the latter, enterprising Poverty Row studio Majestic Pictures capitalised on
the advance publicity by teaming them up once more in a rushed production
called The Vampire Bat and sending
that out before Wax Museum could be
released. This explains its slapdash, hurried climax topping off a crackpot
62-minute quickie that features Atwill perfecting his insane scientific genius
– and who can object to that?
Directing a
functional script by experienced horror writer Edward T Lowe Jr was Frank R.
Strayer, the same maestro who gave us another haphazard medical misfire, The Monster Walks (see my review dated
21/2). We open on the village of Kleinschloss, plagued by unsolved murders of
its villagers, their deaths the result of blood-loss and neck puncture wounds.
Coupled with an infestation of bats, this leads the Grand Council to conclude
that the fanged undead who menaced them in 1643 have resurfaced to feast on
them again. “Vampires are at large, I
tell you!” shouts the Burgomeister, literally hammering his point home on
the table with his fist. (No wonder he is so emphatic; this was a second time
for Lionel Belmore in the role after Frankenstein
and he would go on to cameos in two of the other sequels).
No-one in
the village seems to have noticed the other peculiar phenomenon, that vaguely 19th-century
Germanic territories in horror films of the era all share both ‘ze Cherman’-accented
characters and imported modern Americans side by side. One such anachronism is Inspector
Karl Brettschneider (Melvyn Douglas) - hot, or at least mild, on the case.
Douglas had just appeared in The Old Dark
House (reviewed 1/4) with Boris Karloff and here he is kept equally busy trying
to get some down-time from the murders with his lover Ruth, Fay Wray. They are
peppered with comic-relief peanuts from her busy-body hypochondriac Aunt Gussie,
(Maude Eburne, who had previous horror form in the area of mice with wings, having
featured in The Bat Whispers in
1930). The full house’s traffic also includes Atwill as the smooth, genial
Doctor Von Niemann with a fully-equipped laboratory, his servant Emil played by
Robert Frazer and housekeeper Georgiana (Stella Adams).
The townsfolk are keen to pin the grisly crimes upon the weirdest person they can find. Their chief suspect is Herman, the local simpleton. His qualifications include a bizarre fondness for the bats, talking about himself in the third person with wild-eyed cackling and being played by Dwight Frye. This is good enough for the reliably unbiased vigilante mob who go after him with lit torches and hounds in time-honoured pursuit of the innocent till he flees into a cave system and tops himself down the Devil’s Well.
By now Frye
had become firmly locked into horror typecasting over at Universal as the
jittery, eccentric henchman, (Renfield in Dracula
and Fritz in Frankenstein), which
didn’t go unnoticed by Majestic. They added him to bolster the image of The Vampire Bat being a major’s studio
release. To further save money whilst giving the appearance of the opposite,
the company shrewdly leased James Whale’s village sets from Frankenstein and interiors from The Old Dark House.
Meanwhile,
back at the Bunsen burners, Dr Von Neimann proves there is more to him than a
warm bedside-manner. In fact, he is remotely sending Emil to the bedrooms of
the local ladies to sweep them off their feet – and into his lab to be drained
of their blood for his experiments. We know this because we are treated to the
sight of him verbally giving instructions into thin air when alone. When he
hears from Brettschneider that Herman has killed himself, he sucks on his pipe,
ruminating inwardly that he can no longer use the young dimwit as a scapegoat
since the most recent murder occurred after his death. His remote puppeteering
of Emil to do the same to the Inspector comes a cropper when Ruth overhears
him. Curses! If only he’d understood that he was only contractually obliged to incriminate himself out loud as a
plot device for the audience’s benefit. Brettschneider hadn’t taken the
sleeping pills the M.D. had prescribed either. (Just as well, since they are
hilariously labelled ‘Poison. Sleeping Tablets’ as if in a cartoon).
As
aforementioned, the denouement is cobbled together and presented like a
hastily-wrapped gift on the run with some very awkward moments. When Atwill
grabs the suspicious Ruth outside his lab, her delivery of the line “You! You’re the one! What mad thing are you
doing?” is comically wooden. As is the stilted face-off between Niemann and
Emil where they look as though they’re waiting for the director to call ‘cut’.
The only high-point is Niemann’s God complex declaration to Ruth after
sputtering some woolly nonsense about his experiments wresting life from life. “What are a few lives weighed in the balance
against the achievement of biological science?” Like a card-carrying member
of the Mad Doctor’s Union, he gives an impassioned aria of messianic lunacy for
the ages. Amidst this crowd of under-achievers, you can’t help rooting for him.
Sadly, in a climactic fight with his servant, he is number one with a bullet.
Lionel Atwill’s
horror campaign though was only just warming up…
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