The road to Cthulhu is paved with massive underwater explosions. Okay, maybe not Cthulhu, but the monstrous villain in Ovidio G. Assonitis’ 1977 Tentacles is a start. Assonitis went under the pseudonym Oliver Hellman in the U.S. release of this Jaws acolyte, as many Italian directors do when marketing their Americanized pictures. What we got was a slice of summer cheddar, left in the sun for too long and covered in sand…
Taking place in Solana Beach, California, a bridge manufacturer has disturbed the slumber of a giant cephalopod who apparently has a hunger for human flesh and is attracted by radio waves. None of this is ever quite explained, as the film takes less than five minutes to knock the audience on its ass with the off-screen devouring of an infant. We’re immediately jumped to peg-legged Billy in his Texas tuxedo, who has just enough time to establish himself as a grumpy old pirate before disappearing off the side of a boat he’s cleaning.
When Billy’s corpse is discovered by bad-kisser Bertha and her paramour, the investigation begins to discover what’s killing these beachgoers. Spoiler alert — it’s a giant octopus whose only weakness is highly-trained killer whales.
Despite the overzealous hilarity of the premise, the characters here are engaging and ripe with an empathetic backstory that effortlessly bleeds into the rather ridiculous ride that only gets more underwater over the course of its hour forty-three-minute runtime.
Journalist Ned Turner and his sister Tillie (played by Academy Award winners John Huston and Shelley Winters, respectively) are endearingly sweet as they discuss Tillie’s youthful entanglements despite her age and Ned’s workaholic tenacity. The story octopuses out from there, as Ned tries to get to the bottom of the deaths, and Tillie helps her son and his best friend enter the youth regatta, which is destined for disaster (this is, after all, an aquatic creature feature).
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Unfortunately, the last 23 minutes of the film have Ned and Tillie relegated to the shoreline. We never find out if Ned wrote his article exposing the danger of underwater construction.
We then meet Mr. Whitehead, the man in charge of the company that has disturbed the high seas and is being implicated as suspect numero uno in the deaths. Henry Fonda, another Academy Award winner and fresh off getting a pacemaker in real life, lights up the little screen time he has as an insolent businessman whose work clearly couldn’t be responsible for such horrific events — but obviously are. His scenes were shot in one day, mostly sitting and talking on the telephone, and no less worthy of the picture for it.
And what’s a good wannabe Jaws picture without the scientist/adventurer Will Gleason, elite trainer of Orcas, played by Bo Hopkins, known for such fanfare as American Graffiti and The Wild Bunch. Recovering from a bad case of the bends, Will beaches himself until the octopus gets personal, kills two of his divers, then goes after his wife, Vicky (Italian bombshell Delia Boccardo).
In one of the most amazing deaths in the film, rear projection sizes up the monstrosity at least twenty feet tall as it breaches the surface before strangling Vicky with its suckers. And if Will taught us anything, “Compared to suckers on a tentacle, claws are nothing.”
If you’re looking for grue and spew, you’ll be sad to find out there is none (save a single floating corpse face blasted into the beginning). Not even when designated fat friend Chuck (Franco Diogene) gets mangled underwater; there are no blood-stained seas to speak of. Lots of splashing and bubbles get the best of our victims, and only Vicky gets the puppeteered tentacle treatment in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment.
But there’s a lot to love about the monster here. A real octopus set upon a series of miniature vessels is quite a phenomenon to behold, as the scale of boats constantly changes from shot-to-shot. Using real octopus footage instead of animatronics makes the monster feel small and out of scope with the rest of its environment. Essentially, it looks like a small octopus attacking toy boats.
Prior to filming, production spent close to $1 million on a life-sized replica of the octopus to be used alongside characters, which promptly sank when the crew put it in the water. It’s one of the reasons the film flopped before it even started shooting, and unfortunately, due to script changes that had to accommodate not working against an actual, physical adversary.
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Compensating, DP Roberto D’Ettorre Piazzoli and Assonitis created a POV structure, building tension around seeing through the octopus’s eyes as it stalks its prey. Sometimes on boats or in diving chambers, the use of killer-POV makes the creature seem very smart, tactical, and intentionally vicious. Which, at first, can seem silly considering this is an octopus we’re talking about, but do you know about octopi? How they can be trained to take photos, figure out aquarium latches, and solve complex puzzles? Octopi are considered the most intelligent invertebrates, so I’ll continue suspending my disbelief on this one.
The epic climax, in which Will’s highly trained orcas are motivated by a stunning Sunday football speech and a boatload of fish to hunt the behemoth octopus, captivates even the most solid critical skeptics. The hero whales will win you over, even if they are clearly hand puppets, biting their teeth into a really real octopus (obtained at a local fish market and already dead during filming). Paired with the epic escape of Will and his diver pal, all is well in the end as our heroes laugh and sail with orcas in tow, apparently very happy to return to the captivity of Will’s Oceanic Institute.
The score is equally jarring to the here-there-everywhere narrative, composed by Stelvio Cipriani (who also composed Mario Bava’s Bay of Blood score, amongst others). The zany keyboard stinger, meant to string suspense in the first act ala John Williams, is oddly dropped for an extended, looping score that never seems to escalate but simply drawl on as youth regatta boats topple over supposedly by the octopus. However, it could be because these are 8-to-10-year-olds operating mini sailboats. Sometimes jazzy and inspirational, sometimes whale sound synth, there’s no telling what this score is trying to tell us except “why don’t you stay awhile and have another warm bloody Mary” (I’m looking at you, Tillie…). The only thing actually Jaws about this movie is the trailer voice-over actor, Percy Rodriguez, who lent his talents to both Jaws and Tentacles trailers.
Tentacles was produced on a meager $750,000 budget, also by Assonitis, and how this star-studded cast accompanied such a spectacle is more curious than concerning. When it rose from the deep on June 15, 1977, it managed $3 million gross box office, making a meager profit which says at least a bit about the audience’s desire for more high-seas creature capers in the late 1970s than critics drawl on about.
Though critically-lauded and endlessly compared to Jaws, there’s nothing but camp and cheese oozing out of this film’s gills. No one is expecting the blockbuster. In true Italian style, this simulacra ocean thriller is a B-sea movie that’s entirely enjoyable, and exploitable thanks to the engaging performances of Academy Awarded actors and their Italian counterparts. Slow at times, gratuitously grindhouse in others, and entirely worth a lazy Sunday watch in the summertime, especially with the blu-ray available from Kino Lorber.
Let’s face it. Undersea horror is a mood. Hell, it’s a whole phobia (thalassophobia), and sometimes you just have to watch back-to-back dives into it. Add Tentacles to your list. Just be careful of the bends!
