Tentacles

Tentacles (Tentacoli) (1977)

Runtime: 102 minutes

Directed by: Ovidio G. Assonitis

Starring: John Huston, Shelley Winters, Bo Hopkins, Delia Boccardo, Cesare Danova

From: Esse Ci Cinematografica

Overall, “somnolent” is a good term to use for describing this film.

This is a movie I recorded on the DVR (from one of the showings that the HDNet Movies channel had last month) and while I’ve seen a few ripoffs of Jaws which involved sharks, the ones involving different animals is a blind spot for me. Not that I’m implying most of those are worth seeing or that they were critical delights-at least this starred one of nature’s most intelligent creatures. I expected schlock from director Ovidio G. Assonitis and that’s what I got. The opening had balls as there’s an implied infant death; if only the rest of this was as daring or bold.

The movie was also apparently inspired by It Came from Beneath the Sea-I’ve never seen that so I can only go by hearsay. It is not the most auteur of plots: underwater drilling causes a giant octopus to lose its mind and start killing people in a seaside California town. Several famous names appear and presumably received a fat paycheck; there’s Henry Fonda for a few minutes in scenes that may have been filmed at his own mansion (I can’t complain too loudly; he just had a pacemaker put in so he couldn’t really do that much) John Huston in a more substantial role as a newspaper reporter who might as well have been Ernest Hemingway, Bo Hopkins, Claude Akins, and in what may have been one of her more humiliating roles, Shelley Winters as Huston’s sister. I say that as she was a crude louthmouthed lady who loved the bottle and acted like a real fool. She also spent a few minutes wearing a giant sombrero so she clearly was supposed to be a blockhead to laugh at.

This has campy charm-some of the effects have aged like moldy cheese, especially during the finale-yet this is a rather sleepy movie where entire scenes happen that are rather dull and you almost feel like nodding off at times. Sure, the Stelvio Cipriani score is rather rad (to echo a thought, at times it seems like something from Goblin. It may not entirely fit here but I still liked it) and I was bemused at such things as seeing a young attractive woman in a bikini hanging out w/ a rather portly mustached gentleman. Yet some attack scenes are a real mess of effects and odd editing won’t help a movie no matter how many unexpected characters you decide to kill off or how pretty the extensive underwater footage may have looked. The presence of killer whales in captivity will of course rankle some people.

Overall, at least this was more “meh” than something that entirely bored me or irritated me. That duly noted, it may be best to put this on if you’re folding the laundry or doing the dishes one afternoon…