Devil Monster

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.

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.

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.

"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.

And I've seen a lot of them. There is more stock footage in this thing than any movie I know except "Jungle Hell" (1956). The only difference is that "Jungle Hell" was all elephants. This one's all sea lions. On and on and on about the stupid sea lions while the stupid crew in their stupid boat looks for stupid Juan Francisco.

Much of the stock footage that isn't sea lions is native women of the South Pacific. I don't know if the editors were blind or what, but whoever was in charge of splicing the stock footage together didn't seem to mind that the women were mongoloid one minute, negroid the next, and caucasoid the next. They change races with surprising speed.

There is another prominent stock footage scene. An octopus in an aquarium (you can see him stick to the glass, and you can see the reflection of lights on the glass) battles a moray eel. The eel is defending all his little fish buddies from the mean old octopus. I'm not making this up. This is presented as if it were happening in the ocean for crying out loud. Who wins? Watch and find out!

Lots of stock footage of men fishing provides for some humor as the overdubbed voices say things like, "Watch out for my face." But it gets tiring after several minutes of the same stupid footage of the same stupid men catching the same stupid fish.

Alas, there is one more big stock footage scene. This one's of the devil monster. It's not a devil, and it's not really a monster. What is it? Let's just say it's not the kind of monster you were hoping for. Juan, who they did find at the end of all those sea lions, battles the "monster". Again, you'll have to watch to find out what happens.

What really surprises me is that the IMDB says this was edited down from a longer, older movie. That tells me that (1) someone thought the original was worth redoing, (2) someone thought this version was better, and (3) the original must've been worse. I can't imagine.