The Vampire Bat

Back in the 1930s and '40s, independent productions flourished on Hollywood's "Poverty Row," a strip of Gower Street between Sunset Boulevard and the Paramount lot. The companies there produced low-budget genre films that often had "strange, illusive qualities" not found in major studio movies, and they tackled taboo subjects like venereal disease and "medical quackery." The UCLA Film & Television Archive preserves and restores these rare and endangered works, and this month, the Cleveland Cinematheque will present six of those films in a program dubbed Down & Dirty in Gower Gulch: Poverty Row Films Preserved by the UCLA Film & Television Archive. Tonight's film, The Vampire Bat, centers on a deranged doctor who lives in a town overrun by bodies drained of their blood. It screens tonight at 9:30; it also screens at 5 p.m. tomorrow. Tickets are $11, or $8 for Cinematheque members and students. (Niesel)