While i have already set my shark movie picks for the summer, i wanna give you something extra in the “killer aquatic animal” subgenre of Jaws rip-offs that don’t fit the “shark month” criteria… well, because they are not about sharks at all.
(This was supposed to be an extra review for July, but i’m gonna do it now as “compensation” for the Masters Of The Universe movie review having to bedelayed AFTER i posted the schedule)
But make no mistake, this is basically the producer of the original Piranha, Ovidio G. Assonitis, credited as Oliver Hellman, cashing into the Jaws craze by stringing together a lot of old big Hollywood actors and having something to put in theathers ASAP, ideally to get some box office revenue in before Universal released their sequel to the original Jaws.
There’s very little point to go over the plot of Tentacles (“Tentacoli” in its original italian release, which is just the italian word for “tentacles”) because you know the plot outlin-well, the plot everything, this is just Jaws but with a giant octopus doing the terrorizing and killing in the waters of a small beach town.
Some small details are different, but there’s no point circling around the obvious, this is “Octo Jaws” and the characters are also transparent in functioning the same as in Jaws, but look, we have an admittely impressive number of big name Hollywood actors roped in: Bo Hopkins, Shelley Winters, John Huston and even Henry Fonda.
Even with Fonda swapping in and in doing so eluding us from having John Wayne in a Jaws rip-off, i can’t deny this is impressive, and sure did help a lot in marketing the film… as in, good for having those names on the poster and hence working wonders as a honeytrap to sucker people into seeing a very fuckin boring Jaws rip-off.
Yes, it has John Huston in a lead role, but by 1977 he was slumming in Rene Cardona Jr films like Cyclone or The Bermuda Triangle… so being here too is par for the course, which is kinda sad and becomes extra clownish when you realize he’s basically playing a Brody equivalent, which would be fine if it wasn’t so obvious this character wasn’t made for 71 yo John Huston, but someone that supposed to be 30/40 years younger.
No offense, he just wasn’t cut out for action scenes or roles like these at that age, nobody really is anymore, but there’s no energy to his performance for which i don’t blame him as he’s horribly miscast here, and given we also see a scene of him rising off his bed in a Ebenezer Scrooge style pijama/nightgown, it feels like a cruel joke at his expenses by the production.
To say nothing of Shelley Winters, here pushing into 60 yo territory, playing the mother of a child she seems more like the aunt, or the frankly icky-ish brother-sister relationship with her and Huston’s character, which is kinda strange (not THAT strange, but still fuckin weird) and – most importantly – just isn’t convincing.
Henry Forda’s role as the “major asshole” is more fitting even though he basically phoned in his scene, literally, just him in a backyard shouting at a telephone, maybe wondering why his isn’t a Garfield themed one like Richard Harrison in his Godfrey Ho phase.
Bo Hopkins also weirdly plays a chill orca trainer in a nearby aquarium, being the Hooper stand-in, but at least this plotline has some payoff of sorts, as we’ll see.
The movie has also been compared to It Came From Beneath The Sea…. for some reasons, this isn’t trying to be a homage to the 50s monster movies at all, and besides having a giant octopus as the “monster/killer animal”, the plot bears no resemblance whatsoever to Robert Gordon’s film.
It’s not even an irradiated octopus, it’s implied that some underwater drillings disturbed it, but even the enviromental message barely registers as a theme, it’s said in a throwaway line or two and basically forgot by the film in record time, i almost forgot about that entirely as well.
Again, this is just an obvious “find n replace” imitation of Jaws that swaps the shark for a giant octopus, and swaps any entertaiment for copious scoops of boredom, as i unsubtly said before.
It’s a very slow paced, boring film, just a quite dull experience, and having a cast of aging Hollywood actors can do very little with the awful dialogues and characters they’re given, all exacerbated by the overall tone, which doesn’t go for campy fun, but instead proper drama, and fails, leading to a scene where the whole town silently mourns some of these character i don’t give a shit about because they aren’t given any proper characterization, if any.
All punctuated by an overly solemn music track which sticks out even more since for most of the film the score by Stevio is often unfitting and kinda confusing, as it zips around from an organ emulation of the Jaws theme to fully going into Goblin territory.
It’s a shame because the soundtrack it’s one of the few things worth remembering of the film, i think it’s actually a “bopper” even if most of the times doesn’t quite fit at all, yet it’s obviously overcompesating, doing a lot of the lifting where the script and direction really do not, it tries to actually give the scenes some impact.
About as weird but far less pleasant than the soundtrack is the weird fuckery of Assonitis playing with freeze frame effects at random for a good number of scenes, it’s honestly so jarring i was wondering if someone fed an old rip of the film in a GenAI program (for some reasons that elude me) and then uploaded the result on Youtube, but nope, the movie often looks like it’s skipping mid-sentence by design and it’s not even a thing that makes it more untentionally funny and less of a drag.
The completely unnecessary and weird freeze frame fuckery also is accompanied by a frankly “hyper” style of editing that feels like i should sue for assault, but also lead to one of the few “accidentally funny” scenes, like the one where the kids on the windsurf are about to be eaten but keep being saved by the editing akin to an old One Piece episode that is about to end but hasn’t quite reached the runtime quota, so it “stalls for suspence”.
The only aspect that’s somewhat interesting is how in the finale an orca trainer decides to literally ask his beloved orcas to help them kill the giant octopus, in exchange for their freedom… but even that makes it sound much more fun than the scene actually is, as the confrontation is – like the previous “fights” against the killer cephalopod – just a mess of close up of a real octopus and the diver spliced with some effects, the kind of shit where you don’t actually see the actors (or the animals) interact clearly with the monster prop.
Or an actual octopus they maimed, i wouln’t be surprised.
We see the prop in a couple of shots, and it looks ok, but its too little too late, so i hope you were not expecting the creatures effects to redeem this film a bit, because they don’t.
I guess why expect anything else off a movie called Tentacles which has a giant octopus as the killer animal…. when octopi don’t actually have tentacles, they have arms, squids have tentacles.
“Suckers” didn’t have the same ring, but would’ve been more accurate.
Plus it reminds me of a far, far better “Jaws ripoff” that was Orca The Killer Whale, that was classy compared to this tripe and – as i said in the review for that one – i recommend you watch that instead. Or the original Piranha, if you’re up for a campy but entertaining Jaws wannabe of that era.
In some regions is apparently streaming on Prime Video, but unless you wanna see all the Jaws spoof ever made, i’d say don’t bother, or at least watch other Italian Jaws ripoffs like Cruel Jaws that have some entertaiment value to them, instead of this snorefest.
The overly invested and frankly too good soundtrack and a couple of weird and unintentionally funny moments, alongside with the cast of aging Hollywood stars at least help avoid Tentacles from being the worst Jaws clone of the lot, but it’s still unbelievably dull.
Get the soundtrack instead.
Wise Cafe (International) 