The Vampire Bat (1933)

Nigel Honeybone’s offering for this week. I know nothing about director Frank Strayer beyond the contents of his IMDB filmography, but the evidence of this film suggests he may have been fond of diagonal wipes to create scene transitions. The Vampire Bat also demonstrates that whenever something becomes big in the world of cinema, there’ll be someone comes along soon enough to capitalise on it by doing a cheaper knock-off of it (hello The Asylum), and so it was with horror right from the start… the genre suddenly took flight in 1931 with the success of Dracula and Frankenstein, so that by 1932 you already had White Zombie and this film (released at the very start of 1933) following them from the lower reaches of the American industry… However, Majestic Pictures did a better job of passing their film off as bigger than it actually was by somehow getting the use of Universal’s sets and the services of Lionel Atwill, Fay Wray and Dwight Frye; the former two were about to hit out again with Mystery of the Wax Museum and Dwight, of course, had been in Dracula and Frankenstein. He wasn’t the only thing borrowed from those films (which also borrows a bit from Caligari too), with the same slightly indeterminate period setting and vague gothic geography of the latter and the  same kind of crap nominal male hero of the former…  So it’s unoriginal even for 1933 and the typically early 30s lack of incidental music hurts it somewhat, but it’s not entirely ineffective, I think largely because of Atwill for whom this sort of thing would become a kind of stock in trade (I didn’t realise until now how scanty his film career prior to this film had actually been). There are far worse ways to kill an hour, though The Vampire Bat is ultimately a film that lovers of 30s B-films will get the most from.