Leofwine_draca 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.

MartinHafer 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.

stephander 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.

JohnHowardReid 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.