Notes on Devil Bat's Daughter (1946)

Nina: "Bats! Bats!"
Dr. Morris: "It's not a bat, Nina. It's a bird."
Nina: "My father!"

I must remind myself that Devil Bat's Daughter actually exists. Others have seen this sequel to The Devil Bat (William K. Everson briefly discusses it in his essay on Strangler of the Swamp in his seminal Classics of the Horror Film), a few, I'm sure, have appreciated it. I keep coming back to it, just to reaffirm that it is not a fevered dream. The title, though reminiscent of many other horror movie sequels, just doesn't roll off the tongue like Bride of Frankenstein or Dracula's Daughter, nor does it initially make sense. This movie is not about the spawn of a evil flying mammal, as might be expected. Instead, it is about the daughter of a mad scientist whose experiments in cell growth stimulation on bats got the best of him (Bela Lugosi, entirely absent from the sequel, earned the nickname The Devil Bat in the interim between these two films). Familiarity with the more typical earlier film is not required. Devil Bat's Daughter is the film one might dream about while nodding off to a late night viewing of The Devil Bat.

Nina MacCarron is alone in the world. She is taken to the police in a catatonic state after learning of her father's death. Overcome with visions of giant bats, she is given to Dr. Morris, a New York psychiatrist out of place in the small town of Wardsley. Dr. Morris sees Nina as the perfect fall girl for the murder of his wife. Awakened from a drug-induced slumber, Nina finds herself at the bottom of the stairs, a bloody pair of scissors next to her.



And a dead body. This brief shot I find particularly disturbing, the indignity of a completely sympathetic character (Morris' sickly wife) in what looks like a crime scene photo.



Nina's fragile mind is shattered.



This movie has gotten under my skin, its myriad scenes of people sleeping, dreaming, and awaking in the typical B-movie tempo is almost trance-inducing.

Nina has to be one of the most inert heroines of all-time. She is in bed in nearly every scene.



Not quite horror, not quite thriller, certainly not just a sequel, Devil Bat's Daughter is a PRC oddity like no other.

Happy Halloween!

A very special PRC greeting to all you Mad Monsters!







Make it a Strange one!

Dangerous Intruder (1945)

Jenny Jackson (Veda Ann Borg) awakes to danger.

Dangerous Intruder is PRC's attempt at a murder-mystery about a strange family à la Guest in the House (1944). Struggling ingenue Jenny Jackson is hitchhiking back to New York from Boston when she is struck by a reckless driver. She wakes up in the the stately home of one Maxwell Ducane. Suspicious movements at night, a bedridden matriarch with a generous will, and Max's ranting about his clay pottery ("Earth and fire, the elements harnessed for use and for beauty! For irreparable and perpetual proof that man is master!") all adds up to trouble.


Mystery be damned! Charles Arnt plays Max
with the subtlety of a sledgehammer.

Filmed a month prior to Detour, Dangerous Intruder shares a screenwriter (Martin Goldsmith) with that PRC masterpiece but, unfortunately, little else. Despite a few quirky moments, such as the scene where Max is struck in the head with a golf ball and starts babbling sinister confessions, the film never generates much interest. The following dialogue sums up the aimless direction of the movie:

Maxwell: "Your coming here, if I were a superstitious man, would seem like a sign...something in the nature of an omen."
Jenny: "Yes, but what of?"
Maxwell: "I haven't the faintest idea."

Lighthouse (1947)

John Litel as Hank broods in his lighthouse.

From the opening scroll: "And always watchful, vigilant, is the man who tends the lighthouse, living his life of oppressive loneliness and seclusion. He lives in his own little world so that others may live---it's a small world---but things happen in it...."

Things, indeed. Like most films out of the PRC factory, Lighthouse runs a scant 62 minutes. This swelled hour is packed with plenty of maritime melodrama. Though the setup has the makings of a cynical nautical noir, the film, unfortunately, never dives into those murky depths.

Hank, a nice, responsible, and, not surprisingly, lonely man oversees the lighthouse. He is assisted by a lowlife, lying, ladies man, Sam. Connie has just been laid off from her job at the fish cannery. Washing away the saltiness which comes with that occupation, she longs for Sam, who, unbeknownst to her is married. On an investigative mission for her missing beau, she unravels Sam's charade. Her spiteful solution: marry Hank. Will Connie end up falling for dependable Hank or will Sam weasel his way back into Connie's heart?


June Lang as Connie decides whether she wants to be a femme fatale.

Despite an attempted murder and an insurance investigation, Lighthouse remains mostly a soaper, with only a few specks of grit, and a handful of hard-boiled lines ("Sister, that ain't just two-timing, that's hittin' you on the head eight to the bar.") Visually, it offers some points of interest. There are a couple of location shots of the grimy seaport town that are quite evocative. A blinking signal light in the housing quarters of the lighthouse serves as a symbol for Hank---the consistent watchdog. Hank's simple life is epitomized by his recurring nightmare of the signal light going out.


This shot of the signal light gone out echoes a shot of a hangman's noose
in Wisbar's earlier Strangler of the Swamp.

Lighthouse is the last of a quartet of movies Frank Wisbar directed for PRC, following the hard-to-find Secrets of a Sorority Girl and two minor horror classics, Strangler of the Swamp and Devil Bat's Daughter. These last two are endlessly fascinating, the former for its rustic other worldliness the latter for its occupation as the most hysterically strange sequel of all-time. They will certainly be discussed further in future posts.

The Mask of Diijon (1946)

Poor Diijon, he has no time for the frivolities of life. A reclusive ex-magician has little patience for a world which is satisfied with cheap gags, tricks, and illusions. His wife, Victoria, tries to inject some practicality into Diijon, whose primary goal, in his words, is to "develop my mind spiritually." Victoria, surely at least twenty years younger than her husband, would rather catch up with her old beau Tony Holiday (what an infuriating name!). As played by Erich von Stroheim, Diijon is a slab of granite, whose normal range of expression goes no further than a slight twitch of the mouth or a roll of the eyes. There are a couple moments where the mask slips. First, when Diijon thwarts a stickup at a diner by hypnotizing the bandit.

So proud of his power, he lets slip a smile. The second instance is when Diijon takes a back seat at the Romany Gardens club to watch his wife perform a sentimental tune, "I Wore White Roses".



He looks up at her with teary eyes.



Startled, she recedes out of the spotlight.



It is a brief moment of poetry, an encapsulation of the character's loneliness. Teetering between pathos and violent psychosis, it looks forward to the scene in Blue Velvet where Jeffrey Beaumont spies Frank Booth alone at the Slow Club crying to the title song. (Another connection between this Lew Landers picture and the world of David Lynch is the presence of Jeanne Bates as Victoria, later as Mrs. X in Eraserhead.)

This is a fine film---economical in storytelling with a few flourishes of style. The tightly knit script satisfies with its book-ended guillotine executions, one more illusory than the other.