The Devil Bat: Kino Classics Remastered Edition

Perhaps the Definitive Version of This Lugosi Classic
Among horror fans, Lugosi fans, and fans of psychotronic films in general, "The Devil Bat" holds a special place. Made by poverty row studio PRC in 1940, the film is a wonderfully ridiculous chiller about a mad scientist (Lugosi, of course)who takes revenge on his double-crossers (no, not the producers of this movie) by enlarging a normal bat to gigantic proportions through electrical treatments and using a new shaving lotion he perfected as the bait to attract the bat to its victim. ...)...

The film has kicked around the public domain for the last decade or so, with the result that VHS prints of it were either excellent or hardly watchable. DVD versions in general have been clear, but this version beats the others and comes close to being a definitive version of the picture, if one is possible.

Released by the Lugosi estate, "The Devil Bat" is the first in a proposed series of definitve versions of Lugosi films. (The unjustly overlooked "Bowery at Midnight" is the second movie in...
You will do it! Or Dr.Shooveocker I will put a evil course upon you....
The Devil Bat is a great Bela outing. Of course its no DRACULA or MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE but its hard not to get a kick out of this grade Z P.R.C opus about a MAD DOCTOR who develops a breed of giant bat he attracts to his enemies with a special after-shave he advises users to rub"on the tender part of your neck." Loads of cheap fun,with cardboard sets and pathetic special effects;Bela seems to be having a ball and so should you! For those of you who love remakes and sequels(???)see The Flying Serpent and Devil Bat's Daughter
Brilliant Actor - Dull Movie
All too often in his career Bela Lugosi was expected to carry a film all by himself with little or no help from other actors, the director, the script or special effects. The Devil Bat (1941) is such a movie. The sets are cheap, the script is hokey and the "devil bat" is laughably lame. And yet as he always does, Bela makes the movie entertaining. He plays one of his
many mad scientists -- this one a (believe it or not) perfume maker who was monetarily wronged by his partners, now millionaires. These ungrateful boobs rub this in a little too much and so Lugosi creates a giant bat (as perfume makers are so good at doing) that will strike at anyone wearing a certain scent. Predictably the mad doctor ends up wearing his own scent and is killed by the devil bat -- but not before he gets his revenge on several of these boring unknown actors who deserve to die. As expected, Lugosi makes the character sympathetic and yet also fearsome as he tells each of his victims, "goodbye" after...
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Night Tide

Mermaid Nightmares
Great low-budget indy horror film from the 60s inspired by the Val Lewton classic 'Cat People'. Fans of other b/w indy horror flicks like 'Carnival of Souls' should really enjoy it. It stars the great Dennis Hopper ('Giant', 'Easy Rider', 'River's Edge', 'Blue Velvet', etc.) as a naive young sailor named Johnny who falls for a mysterious & beautiful girl called Mora. Mora works as "Mora the Mermaid" in a sideshow during the day on a CA Boardwalk. After they become lovers, Johnny discovers that Mora's last two boyfriends mysteriously drowned and soon he starts wondering if Mora is a real mermaid or one of the spooky "Sea People".

The soundtrack is a mix of great bongo numbers & bad b-movie music, but the real highlight is the eerie atmosphere and great stylized photography. The director tried hard to raise "Night Tide" out of the usual b-movie abyss and it shows. Excellent flick!
Something's happening here....
A haunting, mysterious and magical movie. Marjorie Cameron adds an element of real life magic. Kenneth Anger also had done this when he used her in `The Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954)'. Marjorie Easton also adds to the spell, and Dennis Hopper is wonderful. The carnival is the perfect background for a a plot about fantasy and reality. Filmed at the Santa Monica Pier, Venice and Ocean Park, California, where Anton LaVey played organ at strip joints in the late 1940's. The name Mora is found in many parts of the world as the death aspect of the `Triple Goddess', or Night Mare, or female vampire.
A Strange, Moody, Effective Low-Budget Film
"Night Tide" makes extensive use of the Venice, California milieu in which the story is set, telling the story of a lonely sailor (Dennis Hopper) who is attracted to Mora (Linda Lawson), a young woman who enacts the role of a mermaid in one of the sideshows on the pier. Mora, her guardian, and several of the people who make up the sideshow subculture hint at the possibility of a terrible secret about Mora's past loves and perhaps her true otherworldly nature, and the film takes off from there. The streets of Venice (as it appeared in the early '60s when the film was made) are turned into a shadowy, bizarre landscape through the excellent photography and editing, and the colorful supporting characters contribute to the strange, dreamlike mood. Performances are uniformly excellent and right, from the leads to minor characters. Director/writer Curtis Harrington, in his feature debut, has made a low-key suspense/fantasy film that, like the films of Val Lewton in the...
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