The Vampire Bat (1933) (2024)

Popular reviews

• Review by Scumbalina ★★★ 3

  Sometimes you just need Vampire Bat ambiance at midnight. Nothing much happens but it's gray and gothic. I've gone my entire life assuming Bela Lugosi was in this but he is not.

• Review by Dr. Ethan Lyon ★★★ 2

  5/52 of Podcast Macabre 2024- Unseen 30s

  1st Frank R. Strayer

  Ah, Gothic horror, my old friend. Watching this is as cosy as The Mirror Crack’d, and it’s just as surreal to describe this in terms I would use to describe a toasted teacake, a cup of Whittard’s hot chocolate and a night under a warmed blanket. But there’s such a rush of warmth I feel in witnessing Lionel Atwill control people through mesmerism that I can’t help but feel ready for bed. Not that my bed is anything special, currently. It’s a mattress on the living room floor. This is the Gothic Horror equivalent of that thin, hard mattress. No, I will not elaborate that analogy. But I will…

• Review by Joe ★★★½ 3

  Lovely off-brand horror nevertheless has some very brand name horror stars: Fay Wray, Lionel Atwill, and GOAT Dwight Frye. Three striking images:

  - The vicious village mob goes after Frye's character with torches lit by gorgeously hand-tinted orange flames. I don't know why this was done but I'm very glad it was.

  - Melvyn Douglas, for reasons that it would probably be spoiler-y to go into, storms into a mad scientist's laboratory dressed a lot like The Shadow, and it's a better Shadow movie than any of the actual Shadow movies they made in the 30s.

  - The end title card has "The End" printed over a picture of a bat with its back turned.

• Review by Marna Larsen ★★★

  Sets recycled from Frankenstein and The Old, Dark House lend more ambiance than possibly The Vampire Bat Deserves. But for me, most of these oldies tend to fade into the background almost immediately. There's not a whole lot to keep track of so I allow my brain to tune them out while I just enjoy the fog and grainy look of them.

  Not much of a mystery with mr spooky science standing there while they theorize about what type of madman the killer must be! To drain people of their blood! He just stands there with his eyes spinning around in their sockets. He couldn't look guiltier (or creepier) if he tried. They still blame the bat obsessed guy because everyone hates the mentally ill. But it was an honest mistake which only cost a man his life. So. Happy ending?

• Review by Karina Oliveira 2

  -"That blood-sucking legend belongs in the same category with werewolves and all other peasant superstitions."
  -"But the bats, man - the bats!"

  It's like Poverty Row studio Majestic Pictures took all the scary movie staples that were available circa the early 1930s - a dubiously Germanic village full of incongruous accents, a trail of blood-drained corpses, The Old Dark House (literally - they rented the sets from Universal!), fancy lab gear, resident freak Dwight Frye, a torch-bearing vigilante mob (big thanks to UCLA for digitally recreating the fiery hand coloring; it's really cool), mind control, Fay Wray in distress*, a lunatic scientist on a quest to create artificial life - threw them into a blender, and this was the resultant…

• Review by ✯ Miloš⑬ 💀↯ ★★½

  It was just pretty mediocre with boring dialogue that runs for an hour, and not much happens in the movie. They spent too much time talking to each other, and I hated that. I was expecting some special effects, but it doesn't have any. The ending felt kind of rushed, and I don't even remember what the film's plot was.

  However, I thought the colored torches were cool.

• Review by Gentry ★★½ 3

  “God save us, the devils.”

  Part Dracula part Doctor X, b-movie studio Majestic Pictures feasting on the scraps, hoping to capitalize on both of those films as well as the pairing of Fay Wray and Lionel Atwill. The Universal production values aren’t there, but MP does their best sleight of hand to make it watchable, with a decent enough German hamlet/dark old house vibe. Everyone suspects half-wit Herman for the blood loss murders around town, and for good reason, he carries dead bats around in his coat pocket! It ends up being a lot more “mad scientist” than I expected, with gagged and bound (*adjust collar*) Fay Wray in the lair of lab beakers, a beautiful witness to the insanity. Save us from all these devils, Melvyn Douglas.

• Review by Blaze the Action Junkie ★★½

  On the surface this is another early Vampire flick, but underneath it's a murder mystery where the mad doctor fakes vampire attacks making an unruly mob think the real killer is a mentally handicapped young man. It's actually not a bad flick, it did keep my interest throughout. I may have enjoyed a parnormal twist, but the twist here is actually that the killer is not a paranormal entity which helps keep things interesting. I wouldn't go into this one expecting anything great, but it was a bit more interesting than much of the others from these year, and it does so with very little help from any kind of tricks or gimmicks.

  1933 Ranked
  1930's Ranked
  Horror Ranked
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  Crime and Law Enforcement / Investigation films Ranked
  Serial Killers Ranked

• Review by theironcupcake ★★★ 2

  Dwight Frye as a misunderstood misfit and George E. Stone in age makeup as an elderly street sweeper? Sign me up! How I love those adorable little men.

  Frank R. Strayer's The Vampire Bat is an extremely predictable but largely entertaining horror drama. The 63-minute programmer makes good use of its cast, which includes such notable names as Lionel Atwill, Fay Wray, Melvyn Douglas and the aforementioned Frye and Stone. It has always been my belief that Wray was a so-so actress who just happened to be in some iconic early horror films, but she's tolerable here; it's worth sticking around to see Atwill in his creepy mad scientist mode, Frye petting his "soft" bat friends, the color details added…

• Review by noir1946 ★★★½ 1

  “There’s some human urgency at work here, doctor.”

  When I was a wee bairn, I watched the horror films of the 30s and 40s over and over but was always a tad bothered by how slow and badly acted the early ones are, more creaky than creepy. Seeing them today, their stiffness is part of their charm, their stylistic signature. The Vampire Bat is typical of these films. Following are some random comments.

  The main reason for seeing this moderately entertaining film is that the restored version—thanks, UCLA—shown on TCM is absolutely beautiful, with crisp b&w cinematography by Ira Morgan who toiled in the B-movie vineyards for most of his career, with Chaplin’s Modern Times being a rare exception.

  The…

• Review by sakana1 ★★★ 2

  A quickly made effort by a poverty row studio to capitalize on Universal's teaming of Fay Wray and Lionel Atwill — in Doctor X, which preceded The Vampire Bat, and The Mystery of the Wax Museum which followed it by about a month — this is surprisingly fun and genuinely spooky at times.

  The film examines the centuries-long conflict between reason, and tradition and superstition, here represented by science and deduction on one side and, on the other, townspeople with a deep faith in legend and mystical history. This tension is further escalated by the seeming slide by the representatives of reason (Melvyn Douglas' cop and Atwill's medical doctor) toward a belief in vampirism as their modern, enlightened attempts to…

• Review by PUNQ ★★½ 1

  A fairly creepy vampire/mad professor story. Low budget, but still manages to create a crazy world where a bunch of people get killed. Much thanks to a solid cast with Lionel Atwill being excellent as usual playing the scientist. This also features the lovely Fay Wray as well several known character actors to bring about the personality. This is definitely a merger between the Dracula and Frankenstein stories, so it should be a familiar concept for people. Worth your time if you love horror flicks.