Well Deserved Praise

This is a must-see and one of the best documentaries - and films - of this year.

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

To call "Devil Monster" a film isn't really fair, as it's simply a crappy old film from a decade before that's been chopped to pieces, had narration and new dialog added as well as LOTS of irrelevant and cheap looking stock footage. As such, it's just a cut and paste job with no original content and this really was terrible to foist this pile of bilge on the public. It's a completely cynical attempt to squeeze a dime off unsuspecting people.The plot is quite scant. A guy disappears and some folks go looking for him in the South Seas years later. They find him and try to force him to return home--and the man exacts his revenge. In the interim, there is lots of footage and stilted dialog--and absolutely none of it is interesting or worth your time. A truly terrible film with not a single redeeming feature. Heck, it's not even unintentionally funny like many bad films--just duller than dishwater.

"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

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.

"Plan 9" may be the best-known bad film of all time, but "Devil Monster" is an infinitely worse film. Much of the movie is clearly stock footage taken from a much earlier film. Ludicrous narration tries to tie it all together, but much of this grade-Z shlockfest makes no sense. The big finale fight scene, in which a sailor grapples with the Devil Monster, has the cheapest special effects you have ever seen. A man splashing around in water is superimposed over footage of manta ray. This movie is not for everybody, but lovers of trashy cinema may find it amusing.