Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Into the Dark: Tentacles’ on Hulu, a Psychosexual Horror Romance With Extra Appendages for Valentine’s Day

After a months-long COVID-related delay, Hulu/Blumhouse’s holiday-themed horror anthology Into the Dark resumes its second season with Tentacles, a Valentine’s Day creeper that may be the series’ horniest outing yet. It’s a love story with, as the title states, extra appendages, which is a so-so idea in the originality department, but as they say, it’s not what you use, but how you use it, right? Right.

INTO THE DARK: TENTACLES: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Tara (Dana Drori) is a drifter, I think. She’s homeless and seems to be living in her car. We see her bury a ziploc bag full of cash, swipe some deodorant on her pits, then meander into a real-estate open house, where she hides until the coast is clear, so she has a bed to sleep in and have a dream about some type of cosmic horror it seems, what with the images of outer space and a close-up of, what is that exactly, a cloaca? It looks very genital, but, like, in an arthropoddy kind of way. MUST BE NOTHING.

The next day, she stops at another open house, where she meets Sam (Casey Deidrick), a photographer who tends to pull on a flask a little too often than is good for him, it seems. They spark and crackle a little and spend the night together and he puts his face in places and the next morning she tells him she’s kind of, you know, between residences, but she has “money saved from my past lives,” which is a statement that yes, she actually said, I doublechecked, and that Sam probably shouldn’t let go, but I say that having already seen the rest of the movie. They form an agreement: She can live in the house he inherited from his recently deceased parents if she’ll renovate it, and as an added bonus, they’ll probably bounce all the memory right out of the memory-foam mattress.

Something’s troubling Tara, though. She’s painting a wall one day when she hears someone at the door, and she brandishes a box cutter, but it’s just Sam. Paranoid much? She also has a big scar on her abdomen that RED FLAG she doesn’t want to talk about AND IT’S REALLY WAVING HERE, JUST FLAPPING AWAY IN A GALE. She confesses that she has a stalker and is trying to shake the guy, which might explain some of the eccentric behavior. Four months go by, and they’re head-over-heels — and possibly the thing in the title? — in love. His photography career takes a turn for the better, the house is looking sharp, and they’re really connecting, having cute intimate conversations like this one: “If you could live anywhere, where would you live?” Sam asks, and she replies, “Underwater,” but the implications of that comment, which appears to not be a joke in the least, zing right by him, possibly because they’re engaging in significant amounts of hanky-panky. And then one day he puts a cotton swab in his ear and it comes out soaked with blood. Maybe it’s just stress, Tara suggests, arousing a megaton or two of suspicion, in us at least, and maybe these little hallucinatory anxiety-attack-like episodes he’s having are just nothing, and have little to do with that black wiggler slithering toward his ear while he sleeps.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: There’s an Under the Skin vibe or two here. It has a touch of Wrath of Khan ear horror. And it’s about 10 percent as psychosexually traumatic as Zulawski’s Possession, but it did come to mind.

Performance Worth Watching: Drori and Deidrick give good, sturdy performances here, enough to make this love story believable before it gets too batshit.

Memorable Dialogue: “I love you so f—ing much. I wish there was some way to show you other than sex or talking, some way for us to touch brains,” Sam says. Oh Sam. Ohhhhhhhhhhhh Sammmmmmmmmm.

Sex and Skin: A crazy montage of Sam and Tara going at it like crazy, here and there and this way and that, is too artsy to be totally NC-17, but it also doesn’t leave much to the imagination.

Our Take: For about an hour, Tentacles is a halfway-decent dramatic romance with an undercurrent of dread mystery, with enough detail and character nuance and to keep us involved. The screenplay throws in a couple boilerplate supporting characters, including Sam’s sometimes concerned best friend and business partner (Kasey Elise), and the stalker, who turns up and delivers lines and speeches with enough intense eccentricity to give him serious credibility problems. Little weird things keep happening to keep any mundanity at bay, and that’s a good thing.

Then, well, I don’t want to say the film fumbles the ball at the one-yard-line, because it’s more than that — let’s call it a series of turnovers that almost makes them lose the game in spectacular-failure fashion. Up until the plot hits full speed and reaches climax, Tentacles was an upper-echelon Into the Dark entry, nicely acted and directed with a bit of panache. But plot sinkholes open up, it comes perilously close to being an episode of Bad CGI Theater, and ludicrousness reigns. It could’ve used a little levity early on, considering what happens later. Either way, the payoff is muddled, and the screenplay down the stretch screams REWRITE. Somewhere in here is a commentary on the blinding nature of love and the baggage we all bring to our relationships — but nobody has this much baggage, baby.

Our Call: STREAM IT. There’s just enough thriller/genre bite in Tentacles to earn a recommendation, but keep your expectations modest.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Stream Into the Dark: Tentacles on Hulu

Watch Tentacles on Hulu