The Devil Bat (Jean Yarbrough, 1940)

Consider it a premonition of what's to come in The Devil Bat that the director's last name is misspelled as "Yarborough" in the opening credits. A non-classic of "ehhh, that's good enough" cinema, The Devil Bat is a lazy, mediocre, mostly inoffensive B picture with a couple of things going for it — Bela Lugosi and an unusual story. Sure, we've seen revenge-obsessed mad scientists with secret labs full of liquids in tubes and electrical volts many times before, but this may be the only movie where the mad scientist, Dr. Paul Carruthers (Lugosi), attempts to kill the entire families of the two corporate fat cats he works for by massively increasing the size of bats, creating aftershaves and perfumes with a scent that turns the now-giant bats murderous, tricking the family members into trying out the aftershaves and perfumes, and then setting the big-ass bats loose in the night to do some neck chomping. Inefficient and unique!

Dr. Carruthers is the chief (and seemingly only) chemist for a multi-million dollar corporation in a small town near Chicago that manufactures a variety of household items, particularly perfumes and shaving products. Carruthers' bosses, Henry Morton (Guy Usher) and Martin Heath (Edmund Mortimer, but listed as Edward Mortimer in the credits), got filthy rich off Carruthers' inventions, but poor Doc Carruthers took a $10,000 lump sum and future employment instead of partnering up as one of the co-owners. He's regretted that move ever since and thinks Morton and Heath should make it right. They're fat cats, so of course they won't. Carruthers has no other choice than to kill every single Morton and Heath with giant bats and rigged perfume. You'd do the same thing. Admit it.

We kick things off with Carruthers in his secret lab turning a normal-sized bat into a big ol' boy. The bats just hang there limp in most scenes, looking like the stuffed props they are. When bat movement is needed, the film jarringly cuts to an extreme closeup on a real bat's face. Carruthers' lab has a non-secret room where he does his corporate work and three secret rooms with three secret doors for his bat biz, but Carruthers keeps all three doors open when he's working. The lax security protocol with this Carruthers guy, I tells ya. One of the film's few pleasures is Lugosi sporting his fun goggles and grinning while peeking through the window of the third secret lab where he blasts the bats with volts until they embiggen. He has fun and so do we.

Carruthers is interrupted in the middle of his important bat work by a telephone call from Morton and Heath, inviting him to a party. He brushes them off but then says he'll attend when they hint that the occasion is the engagement announcement of Heath's daughter Mary (Suzanne Kaaren) and Morton's son Don (Gene O'Donnell). He then completely ghosts the party anyway. Carruthers is a world-class hater, and I respect his game. The real reason for the party is to present Carruthers with a $5,000 bonus check for all his fine work. The fat cats think he'll go crazy for the check, but Carruthers treats it like the slap in the face it is. Since Carruthers no-shows the party, Heath sends one of his sons, Tommy or Roy (doesn't matter), to Carruthers' place with the check. Carruthers gets Tommy or Roy to slather on some of the new aftershave, and soon Tommy or Roy is dead from a giant bat attack. A few scenes later, the other brother gets killed by a bat, too.

Remember that fake engagement announcement? Don tells Mary they should get engaged for real, but Mary tells him she only thinks of him as a brother. Don then disappears from the rest of the movie. I can't remember if this scene takes place before or after any of the murders, but no one seems that broken up about losing two members of the family in one week. These Heaths recover quickly from tragedy.

My guess about this weird scene and the absence of Don thereafter is that Don was killed by bats, too, but the movie cut it for time and then shoehorned in this odd quick scene about Don getting dumped to cover his absence. The problem is that every character except Lugosi and a newspaper editor played by Arthur Q. Bryan is a total snooze, so we would've never missed Don anyway. Don being a bat victim may also explain the wild inconsistencies in the death toll of the many newspaper headlines the film shows. After the two Heath sons are killed, the newspapers on display list the number of bat victims as two, three, four, and two again. In the rest of the movie, further newspaper headlines jump back and forth between two and three.

Our final important(?) characters are a Chicago reporter, Johnny Layton (Dave O'Brien), and a photojournalist, One-Shot McGuire (Donald Kerr), covering the Heath murders. O'Brien shows a lot of pizzazz in his first scene but immediately loses that pizzazz when he encounters the other boring characters. The only entertaining thing about the subsequent scenes is that the town's police chief immediately takes a liking to the big city reporters and tells them secret details of the case. He immediately loves these guys. We're in opposite land here. He even lets them do their own investigations, and by the end of the movie, the reporters are ordering him around.

If you're a hardcore Lugosi fan, this is worth a watch, but just barely. Other than Lugosi, the exasperated newspaper editor, the hilarious sounds the giant bats make when they launch into the night (the only appropriate description I can think of is "party screams"), and the scene where a bat goes flying out of a car trunk, this is mostly a dud. I realize I spent most of this review snarkily rehashing the plot, but there's not much else to talk about.