Tentacles (1977) is truly terrible. The kind of terrible that only comes from attempting to shamelessly ripoff another more popular movie. The movie in question here is clearly trying to ripoff Jaws (1975). Now the glory of this film comes in the ways it tries to rip off Jaws and the inept ways it does so. For example, we have a ripoff of Quint’s iconic monologue from Jaws, instead of being about the USS Indianapolis it’s about a pair of orcas that the main character wants to kill an evil Octopus. It’s truly one of the highlights of trash cinema. It is played so incredibly seriously and that makes it all the more beautiful.
Despite the film being truly awful, it has an amazing cast. John Huston, Shelley Winters, and Henry Fonda. John Huston plays a drunken journalist who is trying to solve the mysterious disappearances that have occurred oceanside. He appears to be our main character as he drives the discoveries of the deaths and the fact that Henry Fonda’s company (ironically named Trojan even though it offers no protection) may be the cause. Much like Jaws, the film ends on the Ocean as a group tries to destroy the creature; however, unlike Jaws, this films Chief Brody (John Huston) just up and leaves the movie. We see Huston hug a grieving mother and then he’s gone. Henry Fonda is wasted even more drastically as he just hangs out at a mansion scolding a company man for getting his name dragged through the mud during these killings. Huston and Fonda have what you could call a “scene” together; in reality, it is just two men talking into a phone, and this scene is supposed to be our big catharsis moment. We get next to zero explanation for the giant killer octopus. The best the movie offers us is a revelation that Trojan is ignoring environmental regulations, and is doing “experiments”. Shelley Winters is relegated to comic relief and her scenes are nigh impossible to make it through. She does the best with what she’s given but it’s wholly unnecessary, merely adding more padding. The padding that this film is rife with is all the more baffling when you realize the film is a full ten minutes longer than it needs to be. When you’re making cheapo monster flicks it’s pretty unusual to see them go past the 90-minute mark.
Asides from the great main cast we get a number of bit players, one of which transitions into being the protagonist late in the film. He is a marine biologist who has trained orcas and dolphins. His family has been massacred by the octopus and he wants revenge. Suddenly we have ourselves an Ahab…a very boring Ahab. This time however we have Ahab teaming up with whales to kill an octopus. This movie ends in a way that you start laughing and then instantly become horrified once you realize what seems to be happening. Essentially you have a five-minute scene of ridiculous orca puppets beating the shit out of a corpse of a thankfully already dead octopus. The scene goes on for SO long and is clearly not a fair fight. The octopus in this sequence was bought from a market and was already dead, this makes the scene all the more traumatizing as the octopus obviously can’t fight back. A few times it will cutaway and you’ll breathe a sigh of relief finally, this weird aquatic snuff film has ended, and then it’ll put you right back in the action as an orca puppet tear off a tentacle.
The octopus is an odd choice for a villain and the one saving grace of this film (asides from the amazingly ridiculous 70s disco soundtrack) is that they really decide to go all-in on silly octopus attacks. We get tentacles lifting people up and dragging them down. We get a weird octopus head flying at insane speeds through the ocean destroying sailboats and we get a few miniature scenes reminiscent of Tsuburya’s work in King Kong vs. Godzilla. Unfortunately, the scenes of true blue octo-madness (Octo-madness is now a trademark of Scriptophobic) are few and far between. For the first act, it’s mostly people swimming in the ocean and then boringly getting dragged under.
Tentacles is a truly awful movie. It’s a movie that was made to be watched with friends. So many of the oddities on display are visual motifs. Like a scene of someone’s feet sticking out of the water hilariously implying that the octopus for no reason whatsoever flipped him around underwater. In the realm of octopus horror movies, it’s better than It came from Beneath the Sea which may sound like heresy but at least this movie doesn’t have some of the most sexist movie characters to be put to screen. Hopefully one day the dramatic reading of the orca monologue in this film will become a mainstay in acting classes around the world.
