Format: Streaming video from Pluto TV on Fire!
I don’t go out of my way to reference Mystery Science Theater 3000, but there are times when I find it necessary. The Devil Bat is one of those cases. This movie didn’t actually appear on MST3K, but it definitely feels like it could have. Movies very much like it did appear on the show. I am put in mind of a Bela Lugosi clunker called The Corpse Vanishes that has a fairly similar plot in a lot of respects. The Devil Bat is no worse than that one, and certainly not a whole lot better.
This is yet another in a series of films that gives us Bela Lugosi as a respected scientist of some sort who is secretly completely insane. Lugosi in this case is Dr. Paul Carruthers, a chemist who lives in a small town called Heathville and who works for a cosmetics company. What we will learn eventually is that the company has made a fortune off of the formulas of Carruthers for which he took a $10,000 payoff (it’s worth noting that in today’s dollars, that’s close to a quarter million). Anyway, now that the company has made bank from his ideas, Carruthers decides he is being disrespected and wants revenge.
