Nina MacCarron (Rosemary La Planche), daughter of the late Doctor Carruthers, of “Devil Bat” fame, is found comatose, having just arrived in town. She has a fear of vampires and her father, and she’s put under the care of expert psychologist Dr. Clifton Morris (Michael Hale), who wants to kill his wife and put the blame on Nina. This he does, and convinces her that she is the murderer. But Morris’s step son, Ted (John James), just back from the war, doesn’t believe it, and sets out to prove that Morris is the killer and then marry Nina.
When a sequel isn’t a sequel. The Devil Bat was a big hit, for PRC, keeping in mind that “big” is relative and PRC was as small as they come. It was a mad-doctor horror film with Bela Lugosi sending giant killer bats to murder his enemies. I’d assume a sequel would involve a new mad scientist and new bats, but nope. This is a psychological suspense film that not only has nothing to do with The Devil Bat, but retcons the earlier film, turning Lugosi’s Dr. Carruthers into a hero who was misunderstood by an ignorant public. Huh. I would have thought him telling his giant bat to strike down his enemies might have made him a villain, but there were no home VCRs in 1946 so PRC probably assumed that audiences would have forgotten what happened in a six-year-old movie.
Frank Wisbar was a competent director that had fled Germany in 1939. His most memorable film there was Fährmann Maria, an expressionist fairy tale on love and death. He would never match that. Stuck on Poverty Row in the US, he remade it as Strangler of the Swamp. It made money for PRC, so they kept the director, writer, and several cast members together, including La Planche, for this pseudo-sequel to a different film. And the result is… not much.
The film hangs on the premise that “inherited criminal tendencies” is the most powerful concept in the world. If someone thinks their parent was a criminal, this will make them insane. As soon as they learn their parent wasn’t, they become stable. If any jury hears about “inherited criminal tendencies,” they will automatically convict a defendant. It’s a good thing the previous film was all wrong and Nina’s father was swell.
While Morris is a slimeball, he’s a reasonably entertaining slimeball. Ted, on the other-hand, is the hero, and there’s nothing of interesting about him. The “romance” is covered in only moments and outside of that he’s a mixture of rude and dull. Unfortunately, we’re supposed to like him. I don’t.
There were multiple ways of making the story more interesting: make it a horror film; focus on the killer; focus on the insane woman. But they went with the amateur sleuthing of the step son, and when you combine that with a PRC budget, there’s no reason to watch.