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Synopsis: A girl lies catatonic in
a bunk at the back of the sheriff’s office of Wardsley, having been
found unconscious in the road by a local driver. Later, a cabbie
identifies her as one of his fares. He tells the sheriff (Edward
Cassidy) that he drove her from the train station to the old Carruthers
place at the edge of town and, when he mentioned that Dr Carruthers had
died some years ago, that she was terribly shocked. The sheriff decides
to visit the Carruthers house and invites Dr Elliott (Nolan Leary), who
has been called in on the case, to join him. There, the two men find a
bag belonging to the girl. Inside it are papers identifying her as Nina
MacCarron, and her father as Dr Paul Carruthers, a scientist known
locally as “the Devil Bat” because of his work with bats, who was killed
along with several locals when his experimental creatures escaped. The
next morning, Dr Elliott calls upon Clifton Morris (Michael Hale), a New
York psychiatrist who lives near Wardsley with his wife, Ellen (Mollie
Lamont). Explaining the circumstances, Elliott begs Morris to see the
still-unresponsive girl, to which he agrees. Morris succeeds in reaching
Nina, who breaks down in helpless sobs as he recounts her difficult
recent history. Morris has Nina transferred to a local hospital. There,
Nina begins to suffer nightmares about gigantic bats. Terrified, she
flees the hospital and runs to the home of the Morrises, where the
compassionate Ellen puts her to bed. Having called in Dr Elliott, Ellen
phones her husband in New York so that the two men can consult.
Unbeknownst to Ellen, however, Morris is not alone: with him is his
mistress, Myra Arnold (Monica Mars), who accuses him of marrying Ellen
for her money and begs him to get a divorce. Morris refuses. Back in
Wardsley, Morris chides Ellen for taking one of his patients into their
home, but she persuades her husband to let the girl stay. Morris and
Nina begin sessions to get to the root of her problems. The girl
continues to deny remembering her father, but becomes terrified at every
mention of him. One day, as the two discuss Nina’s war-time experiences,
a bird flies overhead. Nina, however, cries hysterically, “Bat! Bat!”
– then for the first time speaks of her father. She recounts confused
childhood memories of Carruthers’ work with bats, her mother’s death
from anaemia, and the local accusations that her father was a vampire.
She also confesses to nightmares in which she and her father fly
together as bats, and reveals that at her father’s house, she found an
old newspaper in which he was declared guilty of murder – and that,
suddenly, she was convinced that he was right there in the room with
her.... Morris reassures Nina that now they have the key to her
problems, she can be cured. Shortly afterwards, Ellen’s son from her
first marriage, Ted Masters (John James), is discharged from the army
and comes home, where he is immediately smitten by Nina. Seeing the
growing intimacy between the two, Morris warns Ellen to send Ted away.
Nina’s illness worsens, with the girl suffering increasingly from
nightmares and lapses of memory. Then, one morning, Nina wakes to find
Ted’s dog dead in her room, its throat cut....
Comments: Okay, I admit it:
including a review of Devil Bat’s Daughter on this site is an
outright cheat. Despite its supposed descent from the 1941 Bela Lugosi
epic The Devil Bat, there is nothing here that would allow this
film’s classification as science fiction, or as horror, or even as
fantasy. At the very worst it’s a psychological thriller. But, under the
circumstances, I haven’t much alternative but to break my own house
rules. When I agreed to this Roundtable topic, I backed myself into a
corner. Heaven knows there is no shortage of unnecessary sequels out
there that re-write, re-imagine, undermine, ignore or just plain spoil
their predecessors; trouble is, I’ve already dealt with all of my
obvious choices: Exorcist II, Halloween II, Howling II,
Jaws 2, Friday The 13th Part 2 ---- It was a
case of been there, criticised that. Scrolling ever more worriedly
through my index of reviews, I realised that I really only had two
options: it was either Devil Bat’s Daughter or Ghostbusters II
– and while the latter would have been a more legitimate selection, the
very thought of having to review a late-eighties cutesy baby film----
Well, frankly, as Bleeding Gums Murphy once so aptly put it, I got
enough pain in my life.
Back in the days when B-movies were
actually B-movies, there existed in Hollywood a sliding scale of tiny
studios devoted to churning out supporting features on a budget that
these days wouldn’t keep most stars in mono-colour M&Ms. Down – way
down – at the bottom of the heap were Monogram, who turned out some of
the loopiest movies in the history of filmdom, and the Producers
Releasing Corporation, who made the absolute cheapest. All sorts of
people showed up in the films produced in this particular poverty row:
fallen stars, journeyman actors who simply liked to keep busy, writers
looking for a break, delusional producers whose ambitions outstripped
their abilities – and occasionally, an iconoclastic talent unable or
unwilling to find work within the studio system. Having fled Germany in
the late 1930s, Frank Wisbar arrived in Hollywood via England and from
1945-1947 made four films in rapid succession for PRC. Of those four
productions, the best is undoubtedly Strangler Of The Swamp, a
re-make of Wisbar’s own Fährmann Maria, which proved successful
enough to inspire the undemanding PRC executives to reunite its
director, co-writer and star to make the in every way inferior Devil
Bat’s Daughter, a sequel to one of the studio’s biggest hits. And
the fact that The Devil Bat was considered a big hit should tell
you all you need to know about PRC.
While some of PRC’s productions succeeded
in rising above their circumstances – the work of Frank Wisbar’s fellow
émigré, Edgar G. Ulmer, comes immediately to mind – Devil Bat’s
Daughter is unable to overcome the combination of an inadequate cast
and a cripplingly low budget. Where it falters most is upon the central
performance of Rosemary LaPlanche as Nina. LaPlanche was much better in
Strangler Of The Swamp, where she was playing a strong character
who took an active role in deciding her own destiny. Here she is far
more passive, being called upon to convey “anguish” or “terror” in
static scene after static scene, and she simply isn’t up to the task;
the facial contortions intended to express Nina’s inner torment are more
likely to elicit snickers than sympathy. (Granted, LaPlanche isn’t
helped by a screenplay that refuses to acknowledge her limitations.
“I’ve never seen anyone so terrified – it’s pitiful!” exclaims Ellen
Morris, after putting Nina to bed. Without this guidance, we would have
read Nina’s state of mind as, at worst, mildly put out.) With barely
even a budget, let alone a special effects budget, at his disposal,
Frank Wisbar resorted to the simple and inexpensive tactic of expressing
Nina’s confusion of mind by first blurring and then rotating the image
on screen. Here we get one of Devil Bat’s Daughter’s few tenuous
attempts at linking to its predecessor, as Nina’s nightmares take the
form of hazy but unmistakable excerpts from The Devil Bat –
namely, the giant bat attacks that help make that film so goofily
enjoyable. Here, however, those scenes are as close to horror as we ever
get, and even then they need to be interpreted for us by Clifton Morris:
Nina’s nightmares indicate her dangerous obsession with, even her
possession by, her father, with his vampirism-by-science perhaps
manifesting itself in his daughter as the real thing.
Giving the devil bat’s daughter her due,
the section of the film dealing with the crumbling of Nina’s sanity is
actually fairly affecting. The first crisis is reached when Nina wakes
one morning to find Ted Masters’ dog lying dead in her bedroom, its
throat pierced by a pair of scissors. (Coming upon this scene, Dr Morris
hisses, “Nina, show me your hands!” “No,” she moans, hiding her
hands behind her back in an action both childish and touching.) Much
worse is to come: Nina comes out of a shattering nightmare to find
herself sprawled at the foot of a staircase, outside the room of her
closest friend and surrogate mother, Ellen Masters, who lies dead across
her own bed, stabbed through the throat....
Devil Bat’s Daughter is too short
and too straightforward to make the most of its central premise. If Nina
isn’t guilty of these bloody acts, as she fairly obviously isn’t, then
only one other person could be; and I don’t think I’m really giving
anything away by revealing that the true villain of the piece is Clifton
Morris, who has taken advantage of Nina’s precarious state of mind to
rid himself of his unwanted wife and to get his hands upon the
substantial fortune for which he married her in the first place. In this
respect, Devil Bat’s Daughter is quite an old-fashioned film. In
the thirties and the early forties, there were countless movies
featuring psychiatrists, or alienists, who were quacks, or con artists,
or criminals, or all three at once; who were villainous or comic as the
situation demanded, but who were certainly not to be taken seriously as
medical professionals. This viewpoint underwent an abrupt transition in
the post-war era. With so many in need of help, the status of the
psychiatrist underwent a rapid elevation. In movie terms, this meant
instant promotion from villain to saviour, someone capable not just of
“curing” all sorts of desperate problems, but of doing so via a single
session on the couch, or one brief game of word association. (The fact
that in many of these movies, the psychiatrist was also the heroine –
Ingrid Bergman in Spellbound, for instance, or Audrey Totter in
High Wall – speaks for itself; although in so saying, we must not
overlook Helen Walker’s marvellously malign Dr Lilith Ritter in
Nightmare Alley.) Clifton Morris is a throwback, not in the sense
that he is a quack – on the contrary, it is because he is a good
psychiatrist that he is such a threat to Nina – but because he uses his
professional talents entirely to further his own cruel and selfish ends.
If Rosemary LaPlanche’s central
performance in Devil Bat’s Daughter is weak, the supporting cast
does do a bit better. Molly Lamont is likeable in a pathetic sort of way
as poor-little-rich-wife Ellen, while Michael Hale goes closest of all
the cast to making an actual impact. His Clifton Morris is recognisable
from the outset as a slimeball, yet at the same time we see that he
might well be a professional success, and understand why both Ellen and
Myra Arnold have allowed themselves to fall for him – and be used by
him. We see also the extent of Nina’s danger. The man is a master
manipulator, at least of women (the society woman who has been taken in
by a fake shrink is another stock thirties movie character), and has
everything his own way until confronted by a male antagonist.
We don’t expect much of John James’ Ted
Masters, but here the film manages a surprise or two, although more
through the writing than the acting. The Ted-Nina romance upon which the
plot turns is another aspect of Devil Bat’s Daughter where the
film is badly hurt by its brevity: the relationship between the two, and
Ted’s unshakable faith in the girl he loves – who he has known for all
of a fortnight, and that as a psychiatric patient – is wholly
unconvincing. (Given that the film is only sixty-seven minutes long and
Ted doesn’t show up until nearly halfway through, it could hardly be
otherwise.) In the face of Morris’s earlier warnings about Nina’s
condition, and of Nina’s frank belief in her own guilt, Ted’s stubborn
refusal even to contemplate that Nina could really have killed Ellen
makes him look not so much romantic as a bit thick; and his repeated
declarations of loyalty are eventually too much even for Nina. (Trying
to make Ted give up her, Nina sinks to a masterpiece of bathetic
argument: “I even killed your little dog!” – because, you know,
sometimes murdering a man’s mother just isn’t enough.)
But if the central romance in Devil
Bat’s Daughter is unpersuasive, the tense mother/son/step-father
triangle in the Morris household is completely credible. Ted has seen
clearly enough that his mother has been married for her money – which is
not to say that there isn’t just a whiff of Oedipal angst operating here
as well – and his undisguised loathing of Clifton Morris is both
justified and, frankly, rather refreshing. (“You dislike him very much,
don’t you?” Dr Elliott inquires when Ted begins to voice suspicions of
Morris. “That’s putting it mildly,” responds Ted with a twisted smile.)
When it comes to Ted’s search for an alternative killer, it is not hard
to see that his hatred is almost as powerful a motivation as his love.
The single biggest surprise in Devil
Bat’s Daughter has nothing to do with its central mystery. It is,
rather, the film’s entirely sympathetic handling of its “other woman”,
Myra Arnold. Judged by the usual movie morality, Myra is guilty twice
over, being Ellen’s friend as well as Morris’s mistress; familiarity
with the harsh standards of cinematic justice at the time leads us to
anticipate a grim end for Myra, probably at her lover’s hands. Instead,
the screenplay of Devil Bat’s Daughter declines to condemn her,
preferring to consider her as yet another of Morris’s victims. To Myra,
who has already tried and failed to convince Morris to give up Ellen –
and Ellen’s money – the timing of her friend’s death is just a little
too convenient. She may be in love, but she knows her man; and when Ted
calls upon her during his hunt for evidence against Morris, he sees his
own suspicions reflected in Myra’s eyes. (How Ted, who has been away on
active service, knows about his step-father and Myra is a greater
mystery than anything concerning Nina.) Although she has allowed her
love for Clifton Morris to draw her into an affair that betrays one of
her best friends, Myra has reached her limit, and heartbrokenly gives
Ted the proofs he seeks. Ted is a lawyer by profession, a plot point
that seems meaningless until the closing scenes when he takes both
Morris and the viewer off-guard with a classic legal double-play, first
serving up a piece of evidence that is weak and inconclusive and
allowing Morris to demolish it – and then, having lulled his smug
opponent into false security, springing the clincher on him: the results
of his analysis of the pills with which Morris was routinely doping Nina
prior to the murder....
Judged on its own merits, Devil Bat’s
Daughter is routine at best. However, when considered as a follow-up
to The Devil Bat, it becomes more interesting, and infinitely
more amusing. In the pantheon of sequels that re-write its original,
Devil’s Bat’s Daughter ranks with the best of them. Oh, granted, it
never reaches the ludicrous heights of any or all the Friday The 13th
sequels; but then on the other hand, the Friday The 13th
movies never tried to deny that Pamela Voorhees was responsible for that
first great killing spree, still less to claim later on that she was
more sinned against than sinning. In the case of Dr Paul Carruthers,
however, Devil Bat’s Daughter is guilty of the kind of
revisionism and character-whitewashing that tends to get certain
historians banned from entering certain countries.
Let’s remind ourselves, shall we, of how
The Devil Bat described Paul Carruthers in its opening crawl:
“All Heathville loved Paul Carruthers,
their kindly village doctor. No-one suspected that in his home
laboratory on a hillside overlooking the magnificent estate of Martin
Heath, the doctor found time to conduct certain private experiments –
weird, terrifying experiments....”
Weird, terrifying experiments involving
“glandular stimulation” via “electrical impulses”, no less, which
resulted in giant killer bats ready and willing to rip the throat out of
anyone wearing a certain brand of aftershave; this being the method by
which “kindly Dr Carruthers” revenged himself upon the families who had
made millions out of his “formulas”, screwing him in the process. (Or so
he thought: Carruthers’ choice of a lump sum over a share in the
eventual profits was his own decision, and the financial consequences
thus entirely his own fault. His revenge scheme is therefore even more
outrageous than it appears at first glance.) The giant bats managed to
kill four of Carruthers’ supposed enemies before fulfilling their
manifest destiny by tearing out the scientist’s own throat: an act
committed before the eyes of a reporter, to whom Carruthers had already
confessed, a photographer, and the local Chief of Police.
This is not exactly how Devil Bat’s
Daughter recalls events.
Searching for clues to the catatonic
Nina’s identity, the sheriff and Dr Elliott visit the abandoned
“Carruthers place”. (Amongst its other revisions, Devil Bat’s
Daughter finds it necessary to relocate “the Carruthers place” from
Heathville, Illinois, to Wardsley, Westchester County, New York.
Curiously, while “Wardsley” is a fictional town, there is indeed an
Ardsley in Westchester County: perhaps someone was worried the
Ardsley-ites might object?) In the laboratory, an old newspaper trumpets
“‘DEVIL BAT’ CARRUTHERS GUILTY OF MURDER”. (If Carruthers was already
dead, who left that there?) It is this, we later learn, that
pushed Nina over the edge, reviving all her jumbled childhood memories
of her father’s research on bats and her mother’s death by anaemia,
which together led to local accusations of vampirism. As the film
progresses, the fact that Carruthers’ experimental notes were never
recovered becomes the crux of the matter. Clifton Morris has in fact
found and secreted these notes, which are not only a clear description
of Carruthers’ brilliant experimental work on “cell growth stimulation”
(a movie scientist who writes up his experiments properly!? –
gedouttahere!), but – much to everyone’s astonishment – prove
conclusively that Carruthers was: (i) not a vampire; (ii) not a
murderer; and (iii) not insane; and that consequently, Nina could not
have inherited any or all of those tendencies.
But Devil Bat’s Daughter isn’t
content with vindicating Paul Carruthers at a distance. Oh, my, no.
Check out this eulogy, delivered in solemn tones by Ted Masters
towards the end of the film:
“[Nina’s] father was not a murderer!
Calling him ‘devil bat’ and ‘vampire’ was throwing mud at a great
scientist! He was far ahead of even today’s experiments in cell growth
stimulation, and proved it on plants, and frogs, and bats! It was the
world’s loss when his bats broke loose and killed, because they killed
him, too.”
And those of us who have followed with
great interest the glorious scientific career of Paul W. Carruthers are
left with nothing else to do but to pick our jaws up off the floor – and
perhaps to give a wistful thought in passing to the movie that might
have been made about “kindly Dr Carruthers” and his giant killer
frogs.... |
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