Tentacles (1977) [REVIEW] | Jawsuckers

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.

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Barracuda (1978) [REVIEW] | Burn it to the wick

Most movies about killers animals from the 70s can be “blamed” on Jaws success, this one is a “double whammy” because it can be also linked to one of Jaws’ most notorious rip-off, Piranha from 1978, which – as mentioned before – it’s almost a parody as well, and was directed by Joe Dante. As Piranha did quite well that year, America General Pictures approached him to direct Barracuda (also sold under the title of The Lucifer Project) as well, but clearly it didn’t happen, so directing duties went to Harry Kerwin and Wayne Crayford, both already pulling double duty as actor and co-writer. Gotta pump em out fast, so fast this came out 2/3 months after Piranha.

And while there are plenty of Jaws rip-offs made in that decade, the comparison between the two films in question is fairly obvious, not just because they came out the same year, but because they both have the same theme of secret government experiments that end up mutating marine fauna, in this case more declined into an enviromentalism issue, but also a fairly direct critique of the military, as in they didn’t breed combat-ready mutant cyborg barracuda, but the government basically used a small town as guinea pigs for conditioning experiment to make everyone more aggressive and violent, and more easier to whip up in a frenzy or recruit for war.

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Mega Piranha (2010) [REVIEW] | Rider (Bycicle) KICK!

No, it’s not a spin-off of the “Mega Shark” series, nor a companion piece to Mega Python VS Gatoroid, despite being all produced by The Asylum. It’s that other type of Asylum movie, a mockbuster, but one incredibly desperate, in a way.

As in, the usually try to fool people by chasing after popular big budget production with cheap, fast features titled in a similar way to the movies they’re trying to indirectly rip-off, the plot is usually quite – if not completely – different.

Which is why we ended up with Transmorphers and stuff like Age Of Tomorrow, among many others. But, as i said, they usually do this with huge Hollywood productions, to feed from the crumbs left by the “actual movies” people went to see in theathers.

In this case, it just happens in 2010 we got a very loose remake of the original Piranha from 1978, Piranha 3D, handled by one of the better modern directors for horror and genre cinema, Alexandre Aja, and he definitely crafted a good modern B-movie in the spirit of old Roger Corman creature features, quite good, quite fun, which a direct sequel, Piranha 3DD, which went completely for total exploitation (almost Troma style), and was also quite fun in its own right.

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