THE VAMPIRE BAT (1933) *1/2 It's not just what you got, it's how you play it. Dwight Frye, Fay Wray, and the mad scientist sets would have contributed mightily to one of Ed Wood's masterworks. Instead, here, they're played relatively ineffectively in a manner calculated to horrify and/or astonish. They don't do that, but they could have amused and astounded, if only endowed with some of those grandiloquent monologues that Wood used to put in the mouths of the least likely characters. I like the way that Frank R. Strayer doesn't feel the need to fill the aural space-there's no music until the closing credits, when it's quiet it's quiet. But that's an absence, and there's not much else to it, other than the lazy task of thinking about how much better it would have been if they'd done things differently.
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