This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

This is one of the best horror movies ever. See it. It has great acting. It has a great story line. It is a very scary movie. Bela Lugosi was one the best actors of this time. He is very scary in this movie. There are some very scary monsters it this movie. It a very good movie.. Scarier then The Shinning that is not easy to do.This a horror classic.

By the 1940's Hungarian actor Bela Lugosi was mainly seen in poverty row movies, such was the rapid fall he suffered in Hollywood. These cheap B-movies were mainly pretty bad but Lugosi always put in engaging performances no matter the quality of the material. I would definitely have to say that The Devil Bat ranks as one of the better of this particular bracket of films. It has Lugosi as a chemist who has been cheated out of money by some business partners. He uses electricity to create giant bats who are trained to attack and kill those who wear a specific after-shave he has developed, needless to say, he starts handing out free samples of this to those ex-partners he wants punished.This one is quite entertaining it has to be said. It has the benefit of a pretty decent monster that we see flying around at dusk and then swooping down to kill its unfortunate victims. It may not seem like much but seriously, for a poverty row creature feature, this is well above average. Lugosi is as ever good value as well. The plot-line is silly yet engaging enough with some quite memorable moments. It's still overall fairly average in general terms if I am being totally honest but for a poverty row movie it's definitely on the higher end of the scale. Certainly worth watching.

There aren't many films you could give a '6' rating on IMDb and still call it a great flick, but this is one of them. How could it not be, with Bela Lugosi zapping bats with a combination of electrical jolts to transform them into over-sized killing machines? The scientific basis to all this is non-existent, but what was even funnier was the reaction of that esteemed Professor Raines (John Davidson) who initially gave no credence to the 'Devil Bat' murders. But then after Johnny Layton (Dave O'Brien) shot one, he reversed course and called Dr. Carruthers' (Lugosi) creation a hold over and last survivor from the Neolithic Age! You just have to love this stuff! The thing that gets me is how members of the same family and partners in the same company couldn't make a connection after the first two victims were murdered by the devil bat. Not that Carruthers was very obvious after handing each one a splash of his experimental after shave with a final sounding 'good-bye' before they left. Apparently those couple of checks at five grand a throw weren't enough to buy his acquiescence. Come to think of it, I probably would have gone a little batty myself if the Morton's and the Heath's screwed me out of my share of millions.If you dig down deep and manage to read the newspaper articles concerning the Devil Bat murders, there's an obvious goof in the one by the Chicago Register after Johnny Layton manages to shoot down one of the flying devils. The story calls him 'Henry' Layton while the Springfield Daily correctly mentions his name as Johnny. Seems like someone in charge lost focus for a minute, as the senior Morton was named Henry.If you go for this bat business, there's a couple more cool flicks spanning the decades before and after this one came out. Try 1933's "The Vampire Bat" with Lionel Atwill, or the 1959 Vincent Price picture simply titled "The Bat". They'd make for a very cool line-up on any given Halloween, with each picture's star a notable horror movie icon.

Imbecile, Bombastic, Ignoramus.The Devil Bat is directed by Jean Yarbrough and written by George Bricker and John T. Neville. It stars Bela Lugosi, Suzanne Kaaren, Dave O'Brien, Donald Kerr and Gary Usher. Straight out of Poverty Row is this PRC production that's as bonkers as it is fun. Plot sees Lugosi as a fed up cosmetic chemist who decides that the company he provides his inventions for have not done right by him financially. So in his secret laboratory at home he breeds big killer bats, bats that he rears to kill anyone wearing the scent of aftershave lotion that he has handed out to the targets of his ire. As the bodies begin to mount up and the press whip up a devil bat on the loose storm, journalists Henry Layden (O'Brien) and "One Shot McGuire" close in on the source of the town's terror.The low budget is often evident, be it props and sets that shouldn't move etc, but at just over an hour in length this gets in and does its job with a sort of carefree abandon that is to be admired. Lugosi is having fun shifting from borderline mania to crafty dastard with a sense of humour, and of course there are big scary bats that shriek before homing in for the girl. Result! The flaws are obvious throughout, not least that Lugosi ends up playing second fiddle to the journalists' blend of bravado and buffoonery, but as time fillers go, and as Lugosi's Poverty Row Horrors go, this is impossible to dislike and not have a good time with. 6/10