Just the idea of horror icon Vincent Price and future witch Agnes Moorehead playing together is enough to create a few chuckles, and here, they take their acting skills to a new level of grand guignole as the Miss Marple like Moorehead (a predecessor to Angela Lansbury's "Murder She Wrote" character) finds her cozy abode filled with terror with the presence of the mysterious killer, "The Bat". Stranded in a storm-surrounded home only with her companion (Lenita Lane), Moorehead fears the presence of an intruder especially when Lane witnesses the steel-clawed hands pushing its way into the front door. The premise has Price murdering the home's owner and the villain's search for loot stolen from the bank under the guise of securities and converted into cash. Two young women (one of them Darla Hood, no less!) make the mistake of coming to stay with Moorehead and terror rises.
Camp drama from the gaslight theater era of when melodramas like this traveled around to country theaters in both America and England, there is no shortage of frights, even though it has the most obvious plot in the hundreds of these pot-boilers. Moorehead is fun, and it is great to see her playing a rare lead on screen. This isn't up there with the Edgar Allen Poe films which Price was getting ready to lick his lips over (and wring his hands, of course), but it is one of the better "B" horror films of the late 50's, entertaining and at times nail biting. There's also some amazingly violent sequences with one of the characters most brutally dispatched of in a manner that in retrospective is truly horrific. Of course, there's plenty of red herrings and other assorted suspects, and the conclusion is so out of left field that you might roll your eyes so far back that they never return to the front of your head.
Camp drama from the gaslight theater era of when melodramas like this traveled around to country theaters in both America and England, there is no shortage of frights, even though it has the most obvious plot in the hundreds of these pot-boilers. Moorehead is fun, and it is great to see her playing a rare lead on screen. This isn't up there with the Edgar Allen Poe films which Price was getting ready to lick his lips over (and wring his hands, of course), but it is one of the better "B" horror films of the late 50's, entertaining and at times nail biting. There's also some amazingly violent sequences with one of the characters most brutally dispatched of in a manner that in retrospective is truly horrific. Of course, there's plenty of red herrings and other assorted suspects, and the conclusion is so out of left field that you might roll your eyes so far back that they never return to the front of your head.