1st watched 12/25/2013 -- 3 out of 10(Dir-Crane Wilbur): Corny whodunit disguised as a horror movie with the king of the genre, Vincent Price, with the star billing. The movie is based on a play and the movie has that kind of feel to it in it's presentation. It starts as a mystery writer, played by Agnes Moorehead, rents out a house with a storied past as a vacation spot. It seems that a criminal called "the bat" has just murdered a couple of women there the last winter, and the being still seems to have some kind of control over it. The writer visits her bank and they discover there is a million dollars in securities missing while the president and his doctor is on a hunting trip. The doctor is the Vincent Price character and he decides to take things into his own hands when he discovers the president did the embezzling. This is where the plot and story gets very confusing as "the bat" starts showing up at the house all over again. Price's character just happens to study bats and he is thrown at the audience pretty blatantly trying to get us to believe he is 'the bat.' I will not reveal the true identity of the character(although I figured it out about 1/2 hour left in the movie) but I will just say that you probably won't care by the end of the movie. There were plenty of twists to the movie, but the real problem other than the bland acting was that it manipulates the audience and it's get boring very quickly. This is definitely an attempt at a different kind of horror/murder mystery but it falls pretty short of anything worthwhile.
