Devil Monster

Devil Monster (1946)

1/2 (out of 4)

Robert (Barry Norton) is in love with Louise (Blanche Mehaffey) but she's in love with Jose (Jack Del Rio). The only problem is that he is lost at sea so Robert has to know whether or not he's alive so that Louise might pick him. Soon Robert is at sea battling a large monster (actually a manta ray).

THE SEA FIEND is also known as DEVIL MONSTER but whatever you call it doesn't take away the fact that it has to be one of the laziest and cheapest films ever made. I didn't actually time everything out but this 63-minute movie is probably 90% stock footage. If you thought what Edward D. Wood, Jr. did in GLEN OR GLENDA? was cheap then you haven't seen anything yet.

The amazing thing is that there's so little "new" footage shot. The majority of the film is narration as we get the story told by Robert who is usually just talking about the various stock footage that we're looking at. This stock footage has some pretty unique stuff including various sea life but at the same time you can't really give this film too much credit for that. There are some native women that are shown topless so this here might please some people but I doubt it.

From what I've read, the 1946 version under the title DEVIL MONSTER is a different edit that the 1936 film under THE SEA FIEND. I hope to view that version at some point but this film is pretty pointless.

When you discover that two-thirds is stock footage, and the rest re-edited from an earlier 1936 picture entitled "The Sea Fiend", you know not to expect much. And yet still "Devil Monster" manages to over-promise and under-deliver. Essentially it's the tale of a young man (Norton) begged by the mother of a lost seaman to locate her son (Del Rio) on one of his father's regular tuna voyages; the woman he now loves also keen to discover the fate of her former lover - one in the same.

There's a lot of stock footage in between of sea lions frolicking, birds feathering their nests, native girls dancing, and octopus being harangued in an aquarium by an eel and finally, a mass tuna haul. There's also a brief scene in which a manta ray is captured - apparently sufficient enough to warrant the dubious title. Check out the special effects too - the transparent manta ray struggle is my personal favourite.

Some great corny dialogue to match some egregiously bad moments ensures your time is not entirely wasted ("there was an accident, and, he lost an arm"), but even at just sixty minutes, it's still too much to bear.

"A ship disappears during an ocean voyage and everyone is presumed lost. When evidence points towards a survivor of the wreck, the sailor's mother organizes an expedition to locate her missing son. When the explorers find the missing man living on n island, they take him against his will in order to return him to his home. The consequences of their actions prove very costly for the explorers, when the sailor sets about their downfall for taking him away from his island paradise," according to the DVD sleeve's synopsis.

This "edited version of a ten-year-old film, 'The Sea Fiend' (1936)" is a curious choice for re-release. Perhaps, its generous footage of topless South Sea island native women was the alluring ingredient. Since they were animalistic "natives", they could be shown bare-chested. Non-native women, similarly displayed, would be considered pornographic. So, you have a big-screen movie turning the pages of the "National Geographic", while attempting to tell an adventure story. And, it's not even the original film.

* Devil Monster (1946) S. Edwin Graham ~ Barry Norton, Jack Del Rio, Terry Grey

DEVIL MONSTER is a cheap and non-cheerful effort to make a giant monster movie on a non-existent budget. The whole film seems to be more of a travelogue documentary than a real movie, featuring lame actors interacting with various footage of wildlife. At first the viewer is treated to numerous sea birds such as cormorants and the like before the action moves below the waves. We get staged 'treats' such as an octopus attempting to eat a fish and plenty more besides.

The story is virtually non-existent and about the hunt for a shipwrecked man, but the thrust of the tale is in reality a bunch of people vs. a giant manta ray. The aquarium special effects are less than convincing and the film as a whole makes the likes of PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE look like a carefully-construed Oscar contender.

If there were an award for the most amount of stock footage in a film, this would have to win. The producers probably shot only about 10-15 minutes of extra scenes and spliced them into an hour of stock footage from several different films. Over the stock footage there is a narrator trying to connect the whole mess together. The so called native people shift from white to Asian to black randomly from scene to scene. The special effects (???) are awful and the pop tart, I mean devil monster, only appears long enough to eat some guys arm. The scene where the guy is fighting the monster is clearly superimposed as you can see the water in one part showing right through the other part making the guy in the water look transparent.