{"id":11229,"date":"2025-02-26T23:21:40","date_gmt":"2025-02-27T04:21:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/?p=11229"},"modified":"2025-02-26T23:21:40","modified_gmt":"2025-02-27T04:21:40","slug":"tentacles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/2025\/02\/26\/tentacles\/","title":{"rendered":"Tentacles"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Tentacles<\/strong> (1977)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 American International\/Horror-Thriller\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 RT: 102 minutes\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Rated PG (violence, a grisly image, language)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Director: Ovidio G. Assonitis\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Screenplay: Jerome Max, Tito Carpi and Steve Carabatsos\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Music: Stelvio Cipriani\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cinematography: Roberto D\u2019Ettorre\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Release date: June 15, 1977 (US)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cast: John Huston, Shelley Winters, Bo Hopkins, Henry Fonda, Delia Boccardo, Cesar Danova, Claude Akins, Enzo Bottesini (as \u201cAlan Boyd\u201d), Sherry Buchanan, Franco Diogene, Marc Fiorini, Helena Makela, Leonard Lightfoot.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Box Office: $3M (US)<\/p>\n

Rating<\/strong>: *<\/p>\n

\u00a0I can hear the pitch meeting now. I can hear the makers describing Tentacles<\/strong> to American International head Samuel Z. Arkoff as follows: \u201cIt\u2019s Jaws with an octopus.\u201d I can see Arkoff mulling it over while visions of dollar signs dance in his head. He might have been thinking this: \u201cSurely, the same crowds that made Steven Spielberg\u2019s movie a bona fide blockbuster will turn out for this Italian-made\/English-dubbed rip-off.\u201d He ultimately gave it a thumbs-up and it got made. While it turned a small profit ($3M against a $750,000 budget), it didn\u2019t generate the same revenue as its sire. Also, it sucks!<\/p>\n

\u00a0I didn\u2019t know until I put it on the other night, but Tentacles<\/strong> is directed by Ovidio G. Assonitis, the same guy who made the wonderfully whacked-out sci-fi-horror The Visitor (1979). It also has two of the stars of that demented delight, John Huston and Shelley Winters. In Tentacles<\/strong>, the two acclaimed actors play a reporter and his loudmouth sister. Looking at their performances and listening to the dopey dialogue they\u2019re forced to recite, it\u2019s hard to believe they have four Oscars between them. John won his for writing and directing The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948); Shelley got her two Best Supporting Actress statuettes for The Diary of Anne Frank (1959) and A Patch of Blue (1965). What are they doing in a killer octopus movie?<\/p>\n

\u00a0The same could be asked about Henry Fonda (The Grapes of Wrath, 12 Angry Men), a once-great actor reduced to appearing in garbage like The Great Smokey Roadblock (1977), Rollercoaster (1977), The Swarm (1978), Meteor (1979) and City on Fire (1981). He plays the bad guy here, the head of a developing company building an underwater tunnel. Henry\u2019s Oscar would come a few years later with his brilliant performance (opposite daughter Jane) in his swan song On Golden Pond (1981). At least he went out on a high note.<\/p>\n

\u00a0I\u2019ve already told you the basic plot of Tentacles<\/strong>. Obviously, there\u2019s a little more to it than that, but none of it really amounts to much. In the end, it\u2019s just about killing the octopus that\u2019s terrorizing the citizens of the seaside town of Solona Bay, California\u2019s answer to Amity Island. I\u2019ll talk more about that later.<\/p>\n

\u00a0The movie starts off with a baby in a stroller being pulled into the water (off-camera) by something unseen after his mother leaves him unattended by the water\u2019s edge to go talk to a friend several feet away. Naturally, she\u2019s freaked out when she finally notices the kid isn\u2019t there anymore. The next to go is a one-legged sailor named Pegleg Bill. He\u2019s yanked off his boat shortly after his assistant goes on lunch break. He\u2019s later found by a young couple on a dinghy. She\u2019s giving him a hard time about who\u2019s the better kisser, her or some chick named Rosie. She jumps on him, trying to prove her point when Bill appears to their horrified eyes. It\u2019s a gruesome sight.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Ned Turner (Huston), reporter for the local paper, decides to chase the story. He\u2019s an odd one, this Ned. He typically wears a night shirt in the house he shares with his boozy sister Tillie (Winters), a single mother who spends her nights drinking and seducing men. It\u2019s their childhood home and all of their happiest memories are right there. Anyway, he\u2019s trying to figure what could have caused the kind of damage inflicted on the two victims. He does know that the company doing the undersea drilling has something to do with it. They are responsible, of course, but the boss Mr. Whitehead (Fonda) doesn\u2019t want to hear it. He orders his flunky John Corey (Danova, Mean Streets) to deal with (NOT kill) Ned and the rest of the BS.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Ned visits his friend, oceanographer and killer whale trainer Will Gleason (Hopkins, The Wild Bunch), for answers. What are they dealing with in quiet Solona Bay? Will doesn\u2019t know (yet), but he\u2019s already sent two of his best divers to investigate. They, of course, will become the creature\u2019s next victims. That\u2019s when Will arrives on the scene with his hot wife Vicky (Boccardo, 1983\u2019s Hercules) in tow. Due to a diving accident, there\u2019s only so much he can do. He can\u2019t go down too deep or for too long. It would kill him. A worried Vicky keeps reminding him (and us) of this fact. Still, he\u2019ll do his best to be the hero of this fishy fish tale.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Tillie, in a move that defies logic and calls her parenting skills in question, enters her 10YO son Tommy and his younger best friend Jamie in the Junior Regatta. I don\u2019t know the names of the actors playing the kids so I\u2019ll just describe the characters. Tommy is annoying; Jamie pees a lot. Now here\u2019s the f***ed up thing. Even after all the important folks know about the danger that lurks beneath the surface, nobody thinks to call off the event. What in the actual F? Naturally, the octopus attacks in a truly bonkers sequence with more freeze-frames than the J. Giels music video. I thought my DVD player was going haywire before I realized it was intentional. Throw in some wildly inappropriate electronic music and you\u2019ve got the makings of an instant unintentional comedic bit the likes of which could only be made by an Italian filmmaker who thinks he\u2019s the next Fellini or whoever.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Now you can forget about all of these plot threads because they get dropped after the whole regatta incident. Other than Will and his assistant Mike (Bottesini\/Boyd, Encounters of the Deep), we never see any of the main characters again. This is because the production moved to Greece for the finale and the director couldn\u2019t persuade John, Shelley and Henry to fly there. So it is that Will deals with the octopus with a lot of help from his killer whale friends, but not before he regales them with an inspirational speech before they swim off into battle.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Oh, I forgot to mention the town sheriff Douglas Robards. He\u2019s played by Sheriff Lobo himself, Claude Akins. He\u2019s pretty much useless. When Ned asks him if he has any answers about what\u2019s happening, he replies, \u201cI don’t even know where to start asking questions.\u201d He\u2019s no Martin Brody and proves it time and time again.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Science nerds will no doubt take umbrage with the film\u2019s title Tentacles<\/strong>. Octopi do NOT have tentacles; they have arms. It\u2019s squid that has tentacles. I was today years old when I learned this. In any event, semantics are the least of this movie\u2019s problems. I don\u2019t want to steer anybody wrong. I probably made Tentacles<\/strong> sound like great fun, but it\u2019s not. It\u2019s actually a bore. The pacing is deadly slow. There are long stretches where it\u2019s all talk and no action. Worse, the conversations aren\u2019t that interesting. When something finally does happen, it\u2019s frustrating because you see how awesomely fun it could have been if Assonitis had the slightest inkling what he was doing. He had all the right tools and all the right parts; he just put them together wrong.<\/p>\n

\u00a0The acting in Tentacles<\/strong> is supremely bad. The main actors give what have to be the most embarrassing performances of their careers. It\u2019s impossible to say who\u2019s more ridiculous, John or Shelley. His character is weird; hers is shrill. She might have a slight edge because she looks too old to have a 10YO kid. Then there\u2019s that silly sombrero she wears in a few scenes. Henry basically phones in his performance. We never see him anywhere other than his place and he\u2019s usually on the phone with another character. Hopkins is on autopilot here. Boccardo has the range of a department store mannequin; it\u2019s a good thing she\u2019s hot.<\/p>\n

\u00a0The special effects, a combination of stock footage and a rubber octopus, aren\u2019t too bad when you consider the film\u2019s low budget, most of which was probably spent on casting. I imagine it isn\u2019t cheap paying respectable actors enough to appear in dreck like Tentacles<\/strong>. It certainly wasn\u2019t spent on gory effects or a coherent screenplay. The script, credited to three writers, makes no sense. The editing is sloppy, the cinematography is flat and the electronic score by Stelvio Cipriani is weird and out of place. It might be the best thing in this crummy movie. As thoroughly bad as it is, there\u2019s still an iota of fun to be had watching it. I get a kick out of making fun of terrible movies, don\u2019t you?\"\"<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tentacles (1977)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 American International\/Horror-Thriller\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 RT: 102 minutes\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Rated PG (violence, a grisly image, language)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Director: Ovidio G. Assonitis\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Screenplay: Jerome Max, Tito Carpi and Steve Carabatsos\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Music: Stelvio Cipriani\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cinematography: Roberto D\u2019Ettorre\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Release date: June 15, 1977 (US)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cast: John Huston, Shelley Winters, Bo Hopkins, Henry Fonda, Delia Boccardo, Cesar Danova, Claude Akins, Enzo Bottesini […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":11248,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11229","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-b-movies","category-guilty-pleasures"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/02\/Tentacles-PIC.jpg?fit=620%2C348&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11229","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11229"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11229\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11250,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11229\/revisions\/11250"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11248"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11229"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11229"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11229"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}