Devil Bat's Daughter
For a working definition of Hollywood obscurity, you couldn't do much better than the career of Frank Wisbar, a gifted German filmmaker who found himself, like his fellow émigré Edgar G. Ulmer, under  contract at Producers Releasing Corporation, the most desperately poor of the Poverty Row studios of the 1940s.  Typical of his hopeless assignments,Devil Bat's Daughter, released in 1946, was the totally unnecessary sequel to one of PRC's few successes, the 1940Devil Batwith Bela Lugosi; this time, it's Rosemary La Planche--Miss America of 1941!--who falls under suspicion in a series of mysterious killings... has she inherited her father's homicidal instincts? Made during Hollywood's first flirtation with Freudian psychology, the picture is replete with soft-focus dream sequences (with some unconvincing bat effects lifted from the first film) and vague--extremely vague--implications of incest. It's virtually thrill-free, but Wisbar doesn't shrink from his duty, doing his damnedest to come up with creative camera angles and some way of imparting emotion to his waxworks cast. Like many of the Ulmer films of the period,Devil Bat's Daughterbears a strangely touching testimony to the strength of the human spirit--in spite of everything, Wisbar carries on.--Dave Kehr