31 Nights of Halloween Horror part 4 - Tentacles

Tentacles

102mins

Dir. Ovidio G. Assonitis ( as Oliver Hellman)

1977 Italy/USA

I don’t have many rules in life, but two of them are I won’t eat a bug and I won’t eat anything with tentacles.  Tonight’s movie is about something that I won’t eat but will eat you.  I am a sucker for a sea monster movie, and this one looks as bad as they taste.  Tonight, we are serving Calamari, it is Italian Jaws rip-off time with Tentacles.

The movie opens with a woman and her baby on the edge of the rocks overlooking the ocean.  Next is a POV shot of presumably something in the water looking up at them.  A friend calls the woman over across the street, the woman leaves her baby unattended on the edge of the rocks and crosses the street to yap with her friend.  In the distance, we can see the baby’s carriage as we listen to these two yentas blab.  The tension mounts, we know something is going to happen to that kid, we eagerly await a giant tentacle to reach over the edge and grab the baby and pull it into the water’s darkened depths.  We are wholeheartedly ready to jump up and yell, “HELL YES!  This the greatest movie ever made!”  Suddenly a school bus drives by and blocks our view and as it passes the baby is gone.  And that pretty much sums up Tentacles.  We barely ever see shit and when we do it is a close up of a cluster of tentacles or a fake ass looking Octopus head barely popping out of the water.

You would think with a cast that consists of John Huston as the nosey reporter who thinks the dead bodies piling up are connected to Henry Fonda’s underwater tunnel that he is building, Shelly Winters as the annoying mother with the giant sombrero, and rounding out the all-star cast with Bo Hopkins as Hooper/Quint the ocean expert guy who also trains Killer Whales on the side and quickly realizes the only thing that could be doing all this is a giant octopus, would be an instant classic.  Mix in an awesome poster of an octopus grabbing a terrified girl and hot off the heels from the success of Jaws and you would expect to have at least a mildly entertaining film.

Alas this movie is anything but.  All the actors seem to have been handed the script on the first day of shooting or are just reading off cue cards.  The Octopus which may or may not be giant, the scale seems to change frequently between the miniatures used, is either shown in stock footage, close up, rubber head above water or the rare glimpse of a shadowed-out full size creature.  The music is both annoying and misused, attempting to create tension where none exists or becoming repetitive during action sequences which surprisingly have little action.  As the movie falters on characters just seem to vanish, and not in the good way by being eaten, they just stop showing up on screen without rounding out their purpose in the movie.  It’s like the filmmakers were saying, “We have Shelly Winter’s for two days.”  “Ok but we didn’t finish all her parts.”  “Well she is gone, we got enough, no one will notice anyway.”

But despite all of this, the movie’s biggest fault is the pacing, it is just boring as fuck.  It takes too long between inane dialogue scenes for something to happen and when something does happen, we don’t get to see it.  There is one scene where Ben Gardner’s head pops up, but that is it for any gore and zero nudity.  It’s like the filmmakers were attempting to make a legit film here, instead of the exploitation classic this should have been.  Of all the Jaws Rip-offs of that era, Tentacles is probably got to be at the bottom of the ocean floor.  I have sat through the likes of Up From the Depths and Demon of Paradise, both being equivalent to the shit Brody was chumming and Tentacles ranks below them.  Big disappointment, I had high hopes for this one.  So, I am standing by my first statement.  I will not eat things with tentacles and I will no longer watch movies called Tentacles.  But I do want the poster.