Overrated and overhyped

Awesome Movie

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

I gave it 5 stars because I can't decide if it's too awful or too fun! Everything in the other reviews is true ... this is campy, overdone, and terrible. But it's so much fun! Bela Legosi is cartoonish, as usual. (I wonder if the people in the 40s really found him scary? It's hard for us to judge with today's sensibilities.) What would make it a perfect movie would be Abbot and Costello. If they were part of it, then the whole thing would be considered a classic. But sadly, I do think those involved were trying to make a serious movie, so I feel a bit sorry for them as we all laugh with delight at the sheer badness of it. Worth watching for the fun of it.

Lugosi is accompanied by his assistant from 'Spooks …', for doing a similar role, that of a magician, though, here, also a crook; his part is essentially a cameo. An out-fashioned comedy from '47, with amusing roles from Pendleton as the private cop and bodyguard, and Gladys Blake as the piquant _soubrette; Fowley plays a reporter. The lowbrow comedy may be goofy, but the directing is dismaying, absurdly clumsy and inefficient. The coarse style subverts what should of been a bourgeois drama; 'The Bat' has been filmed in an insouciant style, yet, despite the play's mediocrity and the director's lack of feel, there was a basic craft, which lacks here. The topic (the menace, the threat, the attempt to push someone into insanity, to make someone to loose his mind) had already been well used in bourgeois dramas like 'Gaslight'; here, it becomes the pretext for a goofy farce, in which a bodyguard and a _soubrette offer lowbrow comedy.A physician receives a lady who threatens him, then arrives his cousin, who also alludes to compromising facts. Earlier, the physician had examined his daughter in law, with a weird exchange about his feelings for her, suggesting a sulfurous, unholy passion.All is filmed as a farce. There are secret passages in the house (which has been once an asylum), the topography is explained a bit in a dialogue between the guest and his host.The plot is more serious than its perhaps unwillingly, but resignedly absurd treatment, which spoofs the play it has been based on.The movie keeps the structure of a stage-play, but turns the plot into a farce.

Don't be confused by the vivid color in this deliciously silly thriller with tons of comedy-both intentional and accidental. This actually was photographed in a process known as "Tru Color". This is the type of film that Mystery Science Theater used to depend on to ridicule, so wonderfully preposterous and poorly made that you might end up with an eternal grin that freezes from viewing the absurdity, that is if your eyeballs don't end up in the back of your head for rolling them too hard. Horror greats George Zucco and Bela Lugosi are enemy cousins, tossed together here like Lugosi and Boris Karloff in "The Black Cat" to toss barbs over an old vendetta that is never explained. Zucco's son (Roland Varno) is married to extremely nasty Molly Lamont who is being haunted by a mysterious person in a green mask whose image keeps appearing in the window in an attempt to frighten her.Comedy relief is provided by the bumbling Nat Pendleton who is in love with the sarcastic maid (Gladys Blake). Others present include diminutive Angelo Rossito as Lugosi's companion, Douglas Fowley as an obnoxious reporter, and Joyce Compton as his girlfriend, and the sudden appearance of an obvious man in drag looking like something out of "Glen or Glenda". The film is narrated by Lamont's corpse, already dead as the film starts, giving the impression that a dead body's brain can still think. The narration is intertwined with extremely wretched editing and eerie music that pops up every time her corpse is shown. The conclusion is hardly worth waiting for. Enjoy it purely as fun crap with plenty of moments to laugh at, not with.

Much like an "Abbott and Costello meet ...Lugosi" type movie. Nat Pendleton's bizarre and irritating yet somehow endearing slapstick is a major part of the film. The reporter and maid are also rather irritating characters like you find in the old screwball comedies. The midget crawling all over is one of many zany touches, and false leads. Legosi is earnest in playing it straight, as always, and he gets some good lines off. It's a treat to see Lugosi in color.One thing that's irritating today is the (Theramin?) sound every time it flashes back from the body to what happened, because that sound was later appropriated as the "UFO" sound and is now so identified with them that it feels very wrong here.