Devil Monster (1946)

How sad is this?

Good story, Not enough for a whole film

Good movie, but best of all time? Hardly . . .

Better Late Then Never

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.

This movie is available on a 50 movie DVD collection called "Tales of Terror" but the only real terror here is trying to watch this wretched disaster of a movie. The movie was edited down from an earlier movie with lots of wildlife film and "Jungle exploitation" footage of topless native women thrown in with the usual patronizing narration. The special effects are pathetically awful, an undersea battle between an octopus and various other sea creatures is obviously done in a large aquarium! The battle with the titular monster was done by the double exposure of the hero and a large Manta Ray, you can plainly see the waves of "two" oceans superimposed on each other as well as the hero, Jose. All of this should have made for a hilarious, entertaining grade Z movie but unfortunately it's just boring and dull. This makes "Plan Nine from Outer Space" look like a slick Hollywood blockbuster, no exaggeration! Unbelievably BAD.

This action film, made in 1946, or was it 1936?, is a horrible and inept mishmash about tuna fishermen hunting the South Seas for a lost seaman at the behest of his mother and fiancée. They eventually find him on a Polynesian paradise which he is reluctant to leave. They resort to shanghaiing him, not to take him back apparently, but to make him tell them where the good tuna are to be had. But in addition to the tuna they meet up with the Devil Monster, which turns out to be nothing more than a large manta. The story makes no sense and the direction has no continuity. Many of the effects, such as the fight with the manta, are laughably bad. Its only virtue is that the badness of it is unpredictable and that unpredictability is what may or may not hold your interest for a plodding hour. The highlights of the film are the brief shots of bare-breasted native women and a nifty fight between an octopus and an eel shot in an aquarium.

This amateurish, independent, shoestring "B" may be of interest to Barry Norton fans like me who were impressed by his interpretation of Juan Harker in the Spanish Dracula (1931). Alas, soon after a slow and sluggish start, we are forced to sit through at least twenty minutes of crudely interpolated, ancient stock footage before we get back to the main story. And then, after the not unpleasing island sequence (the whole idea of the shipwrecked sailor not wanting to be rescued is a reasonably appealing one), we have to put up with a mind-numbingly miscalculated twist in the plot when morose Jose suddenly reverses character and turns himself into a daringly enthusiastic Captain Ahab, battling a primitively superimposed stock shot of a giant manta ray. I'm amazed I put up with all this rubbish before reaching for the STOP button, but I kept hoping that Barry Norton would do something to justify his star billing. He doesn't! Not one single thing!Despite a delayed entrance of at least thirty minutes, the actual lead player is Jack Del Rio. He gets most of the running. And even Bill Lemuels as the native chief has a more colorful part than our Barry Norton, the film's nominal hero. And as for the heroine, lovely Blanche Mehaffey, she fares even worse. If she figures in more than two minutes of footage, I'd be very surprised. Maya Owalee gets far more attention, and even Mary Carr seems to have a bigger part. And it is the talented Miss Owalee who contributes the movie's one successfully pregnant moment when she collapses on the beach after Jose deserts her. All in all, however, despite Miss Owalee and the film's innate curiosity value, Devil Monster rates as a viewer's nightmare—an almost complete waste of talent and time.