Trump lost! Fuck yeah! And now,
The Vampire Bat.
I wrote about another Frank Strayer movie on this site a few years ago, the unremarkable and relatively dull The Monster Walks, which was a rare early '30s pre-Code horror snooze. The Vampire Bat is just as creaky and visually clumsy (except for a few poetic shots), but it's a lot more fun. Part of that fun can be attributed to its weirdly complicated story and short running time, but most of what makes The Vampire Bat so enjoyable is its stacked cast of character actor greats. They add a lot of juice to the proceedings and keep things lively.
In the current century, most Hollywood movies are two-and-a-half to three hours long and often part of a trilogy or universe or series of trilogies, but the stories just seem to be that old "let's get the gang back together and save the universe" jive, over and over again. Pre-Code Hollywood movies, on the other hand, often have deliriously complicated plots while getting the job done in 60-90 minutes. We live in remarkably unimaginative times for mainstream art and entertainment even as the universe hurls insanity at the human race like the mean kids in PE hurling a dodgeball. Early '30s Hollywood was crazier and more imaginative, yet also more compact and efficient. I would love to see a return to lean, mean, 60-90-minute genre films with wild stories and great character roles in Hollywood if and when the pandemic ends. Anyway ...
The Vampire Bat is set in a small German village and was filmed on the leftover sets from a couple of James Whale masterpieces (the exteriors of
Frankenstein and the interiors of
The Old Dark House), which was a cheap way to make this low-budget film look like an expensive production. Strayer also snagged some top-flight actors who were between scheduled projects and available for a quick shoot, including Lionel Atwill and Fay Wray, who had appeared together in
Doctor X and
The Mystery of the Wax Museum, both of which I've written about on this site.
The film begins with a spooky nighttime walk sequence featuring several bats (this village is full of bats), followed by a late-night meeting of concerned village fathers. Someone or something is murdering the villagers and draining their blood. The burgermeister and his cronies think it's probably a werewolf, a vampire, or maybe just a vampire bat. The skeptical police inspector Karl Brettschneider (Melvyn Douglas) says (I'm paraphrasing here) vampire bats are not indigenous to Germany and vampires and werewolves are not real, you old dumb bastards. He thinks the village is dealing with a psycho killer. Meanwhile, a mentally damaged young man, Herman Gleib (Dwight Frye, who played Renfield in Browning's
Dracula and also appeared in both of James Whale's Frankenstein movies), wanders the village at night, has been seen with many of the murder victims prior to their deaths, and loves to keep a menagerie of bats as pets. That's enough evidence for the burgermeister and his pals to condemn the guy as a vampire.
Inspector Karl is dating Ruth Bertin (Fay Wray), a lab assistant to the village doctor/scientist Otto Von Niemann (Lionel Atwill), and she lives in Otto's castle with her hypochondriac aunt Gussie Schnappmann (Maude Eburne) and a housekeeper and servant. As the murders keep stacking up, Karl consults with Otto on the case and hesitantly comes around to the possibility that vampires are real. Some twists and turns follow, things eventually get wrapped up, and a couple of nonsensical plot strands remain untied. There is also a mysterious scientific experiment that becomes important a little past the halfway point, which dials up the already potent weirdness.
Strayer is too awkward a visual stylist for
The Vampire Bat to be one of my favorite '30s horror films, but the chance to see Melvyn Douglas, Dwight Frye, Fay Wray, and Lionel Atwill together is a blast, though Wray's character is a little subdued here. I'd like to see what James Whale or Tod Browning would have done with the material. Nevertheless,
The Vampire Bat is a solid 65 minutes of horror fun.
Trump will not be president in a few months! Huzzah!
The Vampire Bat is set in a small German village and was filmed on the leftover sets from a couple of James Whale masterpieces (the exteriors of Frankenstein and the interiors of The Old Dark House), which was a cheap way to make this low-budget film look like an expensive production. Strayer also snagged some top-flight actors who were between scheduled projects and available for a quick shoot, including Lionel Atwill and Fay Wray, who had appeared together in Doctor X and The Mystery of the Wax Museum, both of which I've written about on this site.
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