one of my absolute favorites!

Intense, gripping, stylish and poignant

Just intense enough to provide a much-needed diversion, just lightweight enough to make you forget about it soon after it’s over. It’s not exactly “good,” per se, but it does what it sets out to do in terms of putting us on edge, which makes it … successful?

One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

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.

I love a bad movie, but this movie is just bad. It contains more stock footage than any real scripted scenes. The constant white glow through out the whole movie is just unappealing to the eye. The fight scene with the octopus and eel, is clearly in a fish tank when it suppose to be under water. The Use of tribe footage with the Voice over just got boring slow and not even documentary like. The cuts from scene to scene sometimes appears to from different films. The score was so obnoxious, plain, and repeated it self numerous times. The dialogue is terrible, and at times made no sense on what they were talking about. There's almost no effort in this movie that's why it's got a 1-10.

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 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.